Gentle Warrior: A. Philip Randolph (1889 - 1979)

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Gentle Warrior: A. Philip Randolph (1889 - 1979)

• He was called the most dangerous black in America.
• He led 250,000 people in the historic 1963 March on Washington.
• He spoke for all the dispossessed: Blacks, poor Whites, Puerto Ricans, Indians and Mexican Americans.
• He attained for Black workers their rightful seat in the house of Labor.
• He won the fight to ban discrimination in the armed forces.
• He organized the 1957-prayer pilgrimage for the civil rights bill.
• He was President of the Institute, bearing his name, and President Emeritus of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union he built.

The words and deeds of A. Philip Randolph show us the unyielding strength of his life-long struggle for full human rights for the Blacks and all the disinherited of the nation. In his cry for freedom and justice, Mr. Randolph echoed the fury of all the enslaved. It is a fight for freedom with the kind of desperate strength that only deep wounds can call forth. With none of his words, however, does Mr. Randolph turn aside the help of others. From the day of his arrival in Harlem in 1911, Mr. Randolph was in the thick of the struggle for freedom for Black Americans. 

Skilled at building a movement through coalitions with natural allies, Mr. Randolph worked long years in the search for equal human rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 are all the fruits of the seed he and his co-workers sowed. Asa Philip Randolph always called for jobs and money as being the passports to human rights. As a man living in the bread-and-butter world, Mr. Randolph knew that a good weekly paycheck had to be won first. Then, after the children were fed, a better fight could be waged for dignity and self-pride.