Born April 15, 1889
Crescent City, Florida
Died May 16, 1979
New York, New York
Labor leader and civil rights activist
As founding president, A. Philip Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to become the first successful black labor union in the United States. Randolph was instrumental in forcing the integration of the U.S. armed forces and for securing equal rights for African Americans in the workplace. He was the national director of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Peace, Jobs, and Justice.
Asa Philip Randolph was born in 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, into a poor family. Randolph’s father, James William Randolph, was a minister and a tailor. His mother, Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, had given birth to her first son, James, Jr., when she was just fifteen years old. She had Asa two years later. Despite the family’s difficulties making ends meet, James William Randolph tutored his sons in reading and refused to use segregated facilities. (Randolph grew up during the Jim Crow era, from the 1890s through the 1960s, in which the separation of races on every level of society was mandated by laws and social customs.)
Randolph did well in school.
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