ASA PHILIP RANDOLPH
Asa Phillip Randolph made an amazing contribution to the Northeast Florida community, the Civil Rights Movement, and Harlem Renaissance. Randolph led a ten-year drive to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and served as the organization's first president. Randolph also directed the March on Washington movement, advocating to end job discrimination for blacks in the defense industry.
On April 15, 1889, Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida. In 1891, his family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where his father Rev. Reverend James William Randolph became a part of a growing black community and started the New Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1905. Asa was greatly influenced by his father. He liked to read, and his father encouraged him to read by providing books at home. His father taught him that color was less important than a person’s character and conduct. His mother taught him the value of education and to defend oneself physically, if necessary.
In 1911, Randolph moved to New York and, joined by his new friend Chandler Owen and the aid of his new wife Lucille, soon became a prominent street-corner orator preaching radical politics on the corner of Lenox Ave and 135th Street. His passion and eloquence led him to being offered a position as president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which would become the nation’s largest black labor union. In 1940, Randolph called for “10,000 loyal Negro American citizens” to march on Washington, D.C., after President Franklin Roosevelt refused to issue an executive order to ban discrimination against black workers in wartime industries. Many of Randolph’s mentors in the labor movement to that point had been socialists, many having traveled directly from Russia. For this March, however, Randolph explicitly called on African Americans—he knew that Roosevelt was attempting to build support for a war against Adolph Hitler, the extreme-right racist leader of Germany. So how would it look if 10,000 black men were marching down the streets of the capital protesting him? Pressed to take action, President Roosevelt eventually issued Executive Order 8802 six days before the march, banning discrimination in the defense industries. True to his word, Randolph called off this march.
Following WWII, Randolph pressured President Harry S. Truman to end segregation in the armed forces, which he did through Executive Order 9981. In 1955, Randolph was elected as Vice-President of the newly merged AFL-CIO.
With the rise of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King in the late 1950s, Randolph hoped to capitalize on his momentum and planned for another march for jobs. King, in turn, proposed one focused on freedom. They decided to merge both efforts together and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was born, during which Dr. King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
LITTLE KNOWN FACTS:
Randolph has been memorialized with a plaque in the Jacksonville Amtrak Union Station;
Amtrak named its Superliner II Deluxe Sleeper 32503 car the “A. Philip Randolph;”
The City of Jacksonville renamed Florida Avenue "A. Philip Randolph Boulevard" and Crescent City named "Randolph Street" in his honor;
Randolph has five schools named after him: the A. Philip Randolph Academies of Technology High School are located in Jacksonville, New York, New Orleans, and Boston.
The baseball teams of two of Jacksonville’s premier black high schools, Jean-Ribault High School and William M. Raines High School, compete every year for the A. Philip Randolph Cup.
