"The Most Dangerous Negro"

A. Philip Randolph spoke for blacks with triumphant passion

With a rich baritone voice that seemed destined to command, an imperturbability under fire, a refusal to bend with the times or the fashions, A. Philip Randolph overcame opposition simply by being himself. The first national labor leader among American blacks, he forged the Pullman porters into a powerful union and pushed two Presidents into conceding crucial rights by threatening a march on Washington and resistance to the draft. Relatively inactive for many years before his death at 90 last week in Manhattan, Randolph seemed remote and perhaps irrelevant to younger civil rights leaders, but there are scarcely any nonviolent tactics in the whole arsenal of protest that he did not employ.

Asa Philip's father, James, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Crescent City, Fla., liked to recall the great days of Reconstruction, when blacks served in Congress. The boy was fired with a determination to recover that glory, and he learned early that there was no more potent weapon than the human voice. "I always liked to talk," he admitted. "Dad spoke beautifully and clearly. A word like 'responsibility' trembled with meaning the way he pronounced it." Though Randolph's youthful ambition to become an actor was thwarted by his parents, he memorized several of Shakespeare's tragedies and loved to recite them with rolling cadences.

After graduating from high school in Jacksonville, Randolph went north to the promised land of Harlem, which fell considerably short of expectations. He took odd jobs, attended night school at New York City College, and started reading Karl Marx aloud with the same enthusiasm that he showed for Shakespeare. Feeling that he now had an economic explanation for racial injustice, he joined others on the traditional soapbox to orate, as he put it, on "everything from the French Revolution and the history of slavery, to the rise of the working class. It was one of the great intellectual forums of America." He also started a radical magazine, The Messenger, which questioned why Negroes should fight in World War I when they were denied freedom at home. The Woodrow Wilson Administration, which moved to segregate the civil service, labeled Randolph the "most dangerous Negro in America." He was arrested in the same summer as Socialist Leader Eugene Debs, and spent two days in jail.

Stubbornly independent, Randolph was not swept up in the ideological currents of his time, resisting both Communism and the black nationalism of Jamaican Organizer Marcus Garvey. He kept his own counsel, shunning Harlem's high society and enjoying the company of his wife Lucille, a former beauty parlor operator whose sprightliness contrasted with his own solemnity.

Then, in 1925, he was approached by five Pullman porters who asked him to help organize their fledgling union. Randolph, whose earlier attempts to organize workingmen had largely failed, at first said no. He was not even a member of that fraternity that shined the shoes and cleaned the cuspidors of traveling America. But he soon saw his mission. The outraged Pullman Co. tried to crush the movement; even Negro preachers and newspapers fulminated against the union. But for ten trying years, Randolph exhorted porters across the country. Finally, Pullman capitulated in 1937 and signed its first contract with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was confirmed in the affectionate title of "Chief."

Now a recognized black leader, Randolph began to take stands on national issues. On the eve of World War II, he was stung by the fact that defense industries were deliberately excluding blacks from employment. After numerous conferences led nowhere, he threatened a mass march on Washington. He was hastily summoned to the White House, where President Roosevelt tried to outtalk him. "He kept cutting in, monopolizing the conversation," complained Randolph, who was not used to such treatment. Randolph refused to budge until an exasperated F.D.R. finally signed an Executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and Government employment.

During the buildup of the cold war in 1948, Randolph once again seized the opportunity to press for change. In an encounter with President Harry Truman that was just as contentious as the one with Roosevelt, Randolph insisted on eliminating segregation in the armed forces; otherwise, he warned that blacks would never bear arms again for their country. "I wish you hadn't made that statement," retorted Truman. "I didn't like it at all." But he, too, eventually capitulated and issued an Executive order banning discrimination in the military "as rapidly as possible."

In later years, as the civil rights scene changed, as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters declined along with the nation's railways, Randolph's reputation was eclipsed by that of Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders. But he was still an insistent voice for moderation in the background. "Don't get emotional," cautioned the man who was always able to exert pressure without getting personally involved. Though he had often been critical of the AFL-CIO for its treatment of black members, he remained totally loyal to trade unionism as a salvation for social wrongs. "We never separated the liberation of the white workingman from the liberation of the black workingman," he emphasized. Whenever a cause needed a symbol of integrity, Randolph was sure to be called--and sure to be there.

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