...ASA PHILIP RANDOLPH JONATHAN D. DUPREE WEBSTER UNIVERSITY HRMG 5930 DANNY KAIL, INSTRUCTOR ABSTRACT Asa Philip Randolph, civil rights leader and trade unionist, was born in Crescent City, Florida on April 15, 1889. He was the second of two sons of James, a traveling minister, and Elizabeth, a devoted member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Both parents were strong supporters of equal rights for African Americans and had an overwhelming influence on Randolph. He and his older brother William would often play childhood games that included role playing in which they worked for African American rights. Randolph and his brother were both superior students and attended the Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, the only academic high school in Florida for African Americans. Randolph excelled in literature, drama and public speaking. It would be Randolph’s strong family influence and academic ambitions that would provide the foundation for his journey on the quest for fair economic and trade rights and racial equality for African Americans. After graduating high school and working numerous odd jobs Randolph devoted his time to singing, acting and reading. Influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk”, Randolph was convinced that the fight for social equality was more important than almost anything else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Philip_Randolph, 2011). Segregation and racial discrimination against blacks was increasing exponentially each...
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...time humiliate them, beat them, bomb their houses, and strip them of human dignity? No! Dr. King was preaching to all who listened, that now was the time to metaphorically cash this check, a check that will give them upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. But to do this, not with violence or retaliation, “we must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” (Carson, 1998, p225) This would be the way Dr. King would want to see his dream played out, with non -violence. Were all his efforts done in vain? On August 28, 1963, The March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin and led by union leader A. Philip Randolph. The backdrop ironically took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. President Lincoln was the man who issued the executive order, The Emancipation Proclamation, which theoretically freed the slaves but up to that point in time African Americans were still not free. At the march, 200,000 people attended. Black, white, ,celebrity, and clergy of every faith were present. This is where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his speech that is regarded as one of the greatest speeches ever given. (Stanford, N.D....
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...A. Philip Randolph At a time when protests were neither popular nor safe, the early 1920s, A Philip Randolph iniated the Brotherhood of sleeping car porters. A. Philip Randolph, born in in Crescent City Florida, was reared in the tradition of the abolitionists. This upbringing instiled in him a social conscience that led him to join the civil rights struggle. His career began when he ran for state office in New York on the socialists ticket. The brotherhood approached him about leading their efforts to unionize. Being an outsider he was immune from retaliation from the company. After strikes and boycotts he finally won representation rights for the brotherhood. This victory gave Randolph credibility which he invested in the civil rights movement.Randolph emerged as the premier civil rights leade and used this power to convice Roosevelt to pass execuve order 8802 which banned discrimination in the armed forces.He achieved this legislation by threatening a marach on washington. Later, in the 1960s he helped organize the march on washington for jobs and freedom. A Philip Randolph's public career helped to advance the cause of all people especially African Americans. However the writers of current history have almost ignored the accomplishments of A. Philip Randolph. This treatment is not suprising since the behind the scenes leaders of movements are often forgotten except by those who participated in the movement. Anyone present in the 1940s civil rights struggle certainly remebers...
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...Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, the second son of the Rev. James William Randolph, a tailor and minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, a skilled seamstress. Randolph attended the Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, for years the only academic high school in Florida for African Americans. Randolph excelled in literature, drama and public speaking. He also starred on the school's baseball team, sang solos with its choir and was valedictorian of the 1907 graduating class. After graduation, Randolph worked odd jobs and devoted his time to singing, acting and reading. Reading W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk convinced him that the fight for social equality was most important. At the age of 21 in 1910, Randolph joined the Socialist Party of America. He moved to New York City in 1911 where he met Chandler Owen who shared Randolph's intellectual interests and close collaborator. In 1913, Randolph married Mrs. Lucille Campbell Green who also shared his socialist views. With the help of the Socialist Party Of America Randolph and Chandler Owen founded the Messenger, a radical monthly magazine, which campaigned against lynching, opposed U.S. participation in World War I, urged African Americans to resist being drafted, to fight for an integrated society, and recommended...
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...I must admit most that I have learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came during Black History Month. And during this time he cited for his speeches and his marches. So after reading “The Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, I felt compelled to delve a little more into this controversial figure. I knew that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a champion to the civil rights movement. What caught me by surprise was that this was a role thrust unto him. Dr. King came from a family of preachers but struggled with the idea himself. He knew he wanted to help his people but felt that being a lawyer or a doctor would best serve them. But under the guidance of several teachers, he realized that he was denying his true calling – the ministry. So at seventeen he became a minister. And it was as assistant pastor in his father church he honed his preaching skills and became know an excellent orator. Dr. King was also political involved having founded the Southern Christina Leadership Conference whose first purpose was to register black voters. So because of his political affiliations and speaking skills he was the one tapped when the civil right movement needed an effective leader. Dr. King had come to Birmingham to answer a call to arms for a recent bombing of one of his aides. Birmingham had long been an epitome of racial divide; Dr. King went there to shed light on the city. Upon reaching the city Dr. King was jail for civil disobedience. And while incarcerated a newspaper ad was taken...
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...ideologically the Civil Rights movement began decades before the nation became aware of it. The work of civil rights activists such as A Philip Randolph, beginning in the mid 1920’s, affected change in the structure of government by pushing for anti-discriminatory legislation for Black workers. Further affecting structural institutions was the effect that World War II had on Black Americans, who were disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the United States fighting for...
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...Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida on April 15, 1889. He was a son of loyal supporters of equal rights and regular human rights for African Americans, his father was a methodist minister named, James Randolph, and a mother named Elizabeth. He and his family moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1891. Asa spent most of his childhood there and ended up attending Cookman Institute which was one of the first institutions with a higher education for african americans in the country. He attended at Cookman until he graduated in 1911, he moved to a neighborhood in New York City called Harlem, with an idea of becoming an actor. He studied English Literature and Sociology at City College, here he held a variety of jobs, including an elevator operator, porter and waiter, as well as develop rhetorical skills. In 1912, Asa made one of his very first noteworthy political moves, he founded an employment agency with Chandler Owen a Columbia...
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...This bloody period of fighting was known as the King Philip’s War because Metacom, also known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoags, was one of the core leaders of the Native American Alliance (Foner, 2014). Though there were many injustices laid against the natives, King Philip’s War happened due to the English stealing land from the...
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...have been stunted and delayed. Body Between 1940’s and 1963 there had been two marches organized on Washington the first was led by A. Philip Randolph whom was the consummate black political organizer of his age. He labored unrelentingly to get individuals and groups to put aside their divisive, parochial, and often petty concerns and close ranks in the formation of a mass movement for the common good. The foremost architect of the modern Civil Rights movement, he urged boycotts in the South against Jim Crow trains, buses, schools, and businesses. “Nonviolent Good Will Direct Action” is what he labeled his movement to gain social equality decades before Martin Luther King, Jr., and others emerged on the 1960’s political scene. If not the man himself, then his influence and ideas were at home at the forefront of virtually every civil rights campaign from the 1930’s through the 1960’s, including desegregation of public accommodations and schools, ending of restrictive covenants, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1957 March on Washington. Randolph is to be credited for his role in passage of the 1957, 1960, and 1964 civil rights acts and the voting rights bill of 1965 as well as one award stated: “No individual did more to help the poor, the dispossessed and the working class in the United States and around the world than A. Philip Randolph.”...
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...Black Power Movements Identify leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and their contributions to their respective causes. How did these social pioneers forge the way for this important ratification? What legislation was relevant during these critical times? Part I Complete the following matrix by identifying 7 to 10 leaders or legislative events from both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The first leader is provided as a model. |Leader and Associated |Date(s) |Organization and/or Cause |Contribution | |Legislation, if any | | | | |A. Philip Randolph |1941 |Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which |His threat to march on Washington to protest | | | |fought Discrimination |discriminatory treatment caused former | | | | |President Franklin D. Roosevelt to react with | | | | |new policies on job discrimination. | |CORE |1942-1947 |(CORE) Congress of Racial Equality fought |This interracial group used sit-ins to open | | | |discrimination ...
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...Philip Randolph launched the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), which helped organize thousands of people of African origin in the United States to march on the nation’s capital in 1941, demanding that President Franklin D. Roosevelt issue an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry. The March on Washington Committee was organized and headed by Randolph and of prominent black leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP and Lester Granger of the Urban League. Although Eleanor Roosevelt met with Randolph and White to convince them to call off the march, Randolph refused, insisting that the President agree to ban discrimination in the defense industry. The threat of thousands of black people coming to Washington, DC, to protest convinced FDR to hold a meeting with Randolph and other march leaders in June 1941. Although the president attempted to convince Randolph to call off the march, Randolph refused unless an executive order was...
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...Congress was trying to stall it. Political unrest had started and violent confrontations were taking place across the country. The turning point was the media coverage of demonstrations and unrest on May 3, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, where police used fire hoses and attack dogs against the civil rights activists. This incident was covered extensively by the media and the use of brutal force against teens and young people caused an outcry in the nation. In addition, the arrest of Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil disobedience following these protests was a further impetus for the March on Washington. There were earlier efforts to organize a March on Washington by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Negro American Labor Council and Bayard Rustin of pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) on July 1, 1941. Randolph was a strong black leader who knew that a mass movement was needed to achieve the goal of stopping discrimination in the armed forces and to allow the entry of blacks into the defense industry. As such, he started to organize the march. The black press wholeheartedly...
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...Philip Randolph, the founder of the sleeping car porters, had an idea of a big gathering of lots of people in the city of Washington, D.C. He wanted to put attention on the economic plight of the United States African American population. Mr. Randolph called on the United States of America’s leading civil rights organizations. He wanted their help in the march and tried to persuade John F. Kennedy, the president at the time, to give money to the demonstration. John F. Kennedy did lend a hand and as everything started to progess, Randolph gave Bayard Rustin, a noted civil rights activist, the assignment of directing and coordinating the strategy of how the march will go. Therefore, Rustin and the group of volunteers he was assigned with started working very hard, every day, all day, to make all the appropriate preparations. Everyone started to hear about the march and thousands and thousands of excited advocates began to make their way to the United States capital, Washington D.C. This was one of the largest...
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...Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (“Jim Crow Laws Segregation and Labor). Similar to when President Kennedy endorsed the march in 1963, President Roosevelt, “feared the reaction an event like this could have on the image of the United States during the war and moved to stop the march” (“Jim Crow Laws Segregation and Labor”). President Roosevelt made a breakthrough in the civil rights movement when the Fair Employment Practices Committee was formed and became a way for African Americans to demands civil rights and punish companies that were badly segregated (“Jim Crow Segregation and Labor”). However in 1963 A. Philip Randolph and other activist leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins the march was organized again and was executed on August 28, 1963 (“Jim Crow Segregation and Labor”). Before the march many African Americans faced heavy segregation in the workplace such as, “they could neither purchase nor eat their meals in the dining car, instead, they had to eat their food in the baggage car” (“Jim Crow Segregation and...
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...system, destruction of their crops, and the sale of liquor to Indians. One of the complaints that led to the violence of the English colonists and the Wampanoag was English encroachments on native lands. As a result, King Philip (Metacom) created an alliance that included sixty-seven percent of the Indian population of that region with the Narragansett people. The group known as the New England Confederation made schemed attacks on white settlements. (64). In their attack, they burned fields, took captives, and killed white colonist....
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