"No earthly price
can stop us."
His father
was a minister with a shotgun. One evening Asa Philip Randolph watched as his
father handed the loaded weapon to his mother. She sat with it across her lap
on the porch. Then he saw his father tuck a pistol under his coat and head into
the night.
His
destination? The local jail near Crescent City, Florida, where a black man was
held accused of rape. He and friends kept a vigil until dawn. They did so to
deter a lynch mob, if it gathered, from dragging the man out to his doom.
When
Randolph saw his father walking home the next morning, he was overjoyed. His
father had helped saved a man's life. Randolph would go on to save and uplift
the lives of many more men.
He was a
bright little boy. But he couldn't go through the doors of the public library
much less borrow its books. His parents were poor. They couldn't buy Randolph
good clothes, but they could give him excellent moral instruction.
“You Are As Able…”
"We
never felt we were inferior to any white boy," he remembered. "We
were told constantly and continuously that "You are as able, you are as
competent, you have as much intellectuality as any individual, and you are not
supposed to bow and take a back seat for anybody."
He got the
benefit of a sterling education. His parents introduced him to Shakespeare and
Dickens, and he attended a high school run by the American Missionary
Association. It had a white faculty from New England. Randolph was the class
valedictorian in 1907.
That didn't
mean he got to go to college or even get decent work. He did odd jobs. He
stacked logs at a lumberyard. He pushed a wheelbarrow at a factory. He a water
boy for a company laying railroad tracks.
After
making his way north, he found work as an elevator operator in Harlem. The pay?
Four dollars a month. His ambition was higher than the top floor. He wanted to
make his mark in the world. In jest he wrote on a wall of the apartment
building: "Philip Randolph swept here."
Mocked as ‘String Bean’
Soon he was
publishing a gazette called the "Hotel Messenger" to try to improve
the lives of 'Negro' hotel workers. His tall willowy build led some to mock him
as "String Bean" Randolph. Gradually he began to meet porters who
worked the swank whites-only Pullman sleeper cars on long-distance trains. They
worked 70 hours a week for awful wages, and they lived in fear of outright
hunger, never knowing when they might get a new assignment.
Randolph
began visiting the porters secretly. After three years, he had organized 5,000
men. It took 12 years, but in 1937 he won legal recognition for the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters, guaranteeing its members a 40-hour work week and
decent pay.
"Freedom
is never granted; it is won," Randolph said. "Justice is never given;
it is exacted. Party has no weight
with us; principle has."
Dignified,
even serene, his friends marveled at his self-control. Said another labor
leader: "Randolph learned to sit erect and walk erect. You almost never
saw him leaning back, reclining. No matter how enjoyable the occasion, you look
around, and there's Randolph just as straight as if there was a board in his
back. He can't relax the way you and I do when we're sitting around talking.
The man had so much dignity."
That Barrier Fell, Too
In June
1941, he worked to force Uncle Sam to allow blacks to find employment in
defense factories. He threatened to lead a march of 100,000 men on Washington.
Fearing violence, Eleanor Roosevelt pleaded with him not to do so. "No earthly
price can stop us," he said, and soon FDR issued an order requiring
factories to drop their color barriers. After the war, he urged Truman to
integrated the armed forces, and that barrier fell, too.
Randolph
was a gifted orator. Once he spoke to an audience of 250,000 people. After all,
he was the co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther
King gave his famous "I have a dream" oration. It took 22 years, but
Randolph's personal dream of a civil rights march in the nation's capital had
finally taken place.
"We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution
for jobs and freedom," Randolph told listeners gathered around the Lincoln
Memorial's Reflecting Pool. "This revolution reverberates throughout the
land, touching every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and
exploited."
MORAL: Have a dream. But be patient with it.
It might take 22 years for it to come true.
Possibly longer.
It might take 22 years for it to come true.
Possibly longer.
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