By Julie Gaebe
During election cycles, we often provide the phone number of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute to voters who need rides to the polls. But who was A. Philip Randolph and what is his legacy institute?
The A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) in the St. Louis chapter focuses on helping voters overcome transportation barriers to reach polling locations. The ride-to-the-polls initiative partnered with WashU Student Union and Graduate and Professional Student Council in 2018, and is a constituency group of the AFL-CIO that focuses on voter registration, education, and mobilization, particularly in the African American communities.
The Institute is named for American labor unionist and civil rights activist Asa Philip Randolph. Randolph’s road to being a civil rights icon was long and varied. He moved to New York City as part of the Great Migration and became convinced that overcoming racism depended upon collective action and his belief in socialism. He was supported by his wife, Lucille Campbell Green, which allowed him to develop his love of theatre and form the Shakespearean Society in Harlem. He used his deep, resonant voice to motivate others. Realizing that collective action was key, he co-organized an employment office in Harlem to provide job training for southern migrants and encouraged them to join trade unions although he was, like others in the labor movement, opposed to immigration. In 1917 he organized a union of elevator operators and in 1919 became president of the National Brotherhood of Workers of America, a union that organized African American shipyard and dock worker in Virginia. His greatest union success was as president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. The union nearly folded with pressure from the railroads until FDR signed the Railway Labor Act in 1934 which granted porters rights. This made him a symbol of civil rights.
Rather than focus on legislation, Randolph focused on presidential executive actions and he began courting FDR to try to end segregation in the military and at defense contractors. Randolph pledged to gather 50,000 blacks to march in Washington. He felt betrayed by Roosevelt when the eventual executive order only banned segregation at contractors, and the military was only desegregated in 1948 when Randolph urged young black men to refuse to register for the new peacetime draft until vulnerable Harry S. Truman capitulated and ended segregation in the armed forces with Executive Order 9981.
In 1950, Randolph founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights with NAACP and the National Jewish Community Relations, and it has coordinated a national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.
Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in 1957 and it is he who arranged for King to learn how to organize peaceful demonstrations in Alabama and to form alliances with progressive whites. He helped organize the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where King gave his “I have a dream” speech.
Randolph died on May 16, 1979. He pioneered the use of prayer protests which became a key tactic of the civil rights movement, and his work for unionized labor and desegregation places him alongside other icons of the civil rights movement.
