I had the pleasure and the privilege of speaking at the Michigan A. Philip Randolph awards at Michigan State at the invitation of my dear sister and great trade unionist, Anita Dawon, President of the Michigan State
A. Philip Randolph Institute.
The core of my speech follows.
A. Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889 in rural north Florida the son of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher. He died 90 years later on May 16, 1979 in New York City. We are now in that time period between the anniversaries of his birth and his death when we should pause to honor him and his incredible contributions to the labor movement and the civil rights movement.
In his 90 years, he founded a magazine called the Messenger devoted to African-American freedom and empowerment. He founded the first African-American union in 1925 before unions had any legal rights at the height of Ku Klan Klan activity in America against one of the country’s most vicious anti-union companies in America, the Pullman Company. The union was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The union finally won recognition and a contract in 1937 — 12 years after it was founded.
With threats of nonviolent civil disobedience, marches and rallies, he forced President Roosevelt to issue an executive order to open up defense industry work to African-Americans early in the Second World War. Then after the war he forced Harry Truman to issue an executive order to desegregate the Armed Forces.
Now that is enough for any one person’s life, but his life went much further.
Randolph and his union and members threw themselves into turning up a great civil rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960′s, one of the greatest freedom movements in the history of the world.
Today the Institute named after him still carries on his work. Because members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had a union, a job with dignity, and the best wages in their communities, they were community leaders. They were deacons and preachers and civil rights advocates.
In fact, in 1953 a rank and file shop steward of the Brotherhood named E.D. Nixon founded the Montgomery Improvement Association in the capital of Alabama to fight segregation. He began organizing and educating the Black people of Montgomery for a strategic campaign, a campaign of nonviolent passive resistance. Nixon even found a beautiful young seamstress with impeccable character to ignite the spark of movement. He sent her to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee to learn all she could about nonviolent struggle.
The day Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she was not tired. In fact she was ready for the first major struggle of the modern American civil rights movement, though she couldn’t have known how important her act of civil disobedience would be.
After Nixon got Parks out of jail, he went to see the brand new African-American pastor of Dexter Ave. Baptist Church who had a Doctorate from Boston University and amazing oratorical skills.
Dr. King came to the lead the Montgomery bus boycott, and build the movement that fundamentally changed the most powerful country in the history of the world.
It should be clear by now that A. Philip Randolph was a remarkable and remarkably courageous man. He again demonstrated his courage when he hired America’s first openly gay organizer, the brilliant strategist Bayard Rustin. Together Randolph and Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his “I have a Dream” speech, setting up the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.