Public Employee Press

February is Black History Month
Ambassadors for progress

A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

By JANE LaTOUR

Travel back in time to 1925, when organizer A. Philip Randolph led the way in a convention held at 160 West 129th St. as Harlem gave birth to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first major African American union in America and the union that for decades kept advancing the struggle for civil rights.

As a young man, Asa Philip Randolph escaped from the Jim Crow South — where a system of laws, economic policies and mob action held segregation tightly in place from the 1870s until the 1960s —and built a new life in New York City. He worked, attended City College at night, joined the Socialist Party and participated in the heady mix of politics, culture and consciousness that was Harlem U.S.A.

After decades of failure in union organizing, the porters recruited Randolph to take up the cause. He succeeded brilliantly and in 1937 the brotherhood signed its first national collective bargaining contract with the employers who had fought ruthlessly for 12 years to stop them. Now the men and women who cleaned the cars, carried baggage and served meals to train passengers were able to move into the middle class. “The Brotherhood stands for service not servitude” was a union slogan.

Crusaders for civil rights
Randolph’s commitment to social justice and equal rights became part of the fabric of the union and its members. The porters became ambassadors for change within their communities and led the struggle to tear down the color bar wherever it existed. In Montgomery, Ala., porter E.D. Nixon became local NAACP president, organized the bus boycott and chose Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to lead it. In an oral history account, Nixon said his training in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had equipped him for leadership. Carried everywhere by the nation’s railroads, thousands of other porters became traveling civil rights activists — missionaries for the cause of equal justice.

As World War II loomed, Randolph called for the first March on Washington to protest segregated jobs in the nation’s defense plants and segregation in the armed services. The march never happened, because the threat alone moved President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, which opened up factory jobs for African Americans.

Freedom's champion
In 1960, Randolph brought together African American union activists and formed the Negro American Labor Council to protest discrimination and demand increased representation in union leadership.

His emphasis on economic rights infused the work of the civil rights movement led by Dr. King, and in 1963 he initiated the March on Washington as a national protest for “Jobs and Freedom.” His 1972 “Freedom Budget” was a visionary attempt to cure the deep structural inequalities in American life. “Not only the poor but all Americans are the victims of our failure as a nation to distribute democratically the fruits of our abundance,” he said.

Randolph died at 90 in 1979. In his lifetime, he pressured presidents, helped end segregation and fought economic discrimination. Though his work is far from done, the lessons of that work endure.