At the same time he was getting arrested for violating antisedition legislation, his personal life became even more bourgeois and upstanding. Randolph married a genteel woman from a prominent Harlem family. On Sunday afternoons they enjoyed taking part in the weekly promenades. People got dressed up in their finest clothes—gaiters, canes, boutonnieres, spats, and fancy hats—and strolled down Lenox Avenue or 135th Street, exchanging greetings and pleasantries with neighbors along the way.
By the early 1920s, Randolph had begun to move into labor organizing. He helped start a half dozen small trade unions, organizing waiters, waitresses, and other disaffected groups. In June 1925, Randolph was approached by a few Pullman car porters who were looking for a charismatic, educated leader who could build a union for them. The Pullman Company provided luxury railway sleeping cars that were leased to railroads. The patrons were served by squads of liveried black men who shined shoes, changed linens, and brought food. After the Civil War, the founder, George Pullman, had hired ex-slaves to do this work, believing they would be a docile labor force. The porters had tried to unionize as early as 1909, but had always been beaten back by the company.
Randolph accepted the challenge and spent the next twelve years trying to create a porters’ union and win concessions from the company. He traveled around the country trying to persuade porters to join the union, at a time when the slightest whiff of union activity could cost them their job or get them beaten. Randolph’s primary tool was his manner. As one union member would recall, “He gripped you. You would have to be without feeling to pull yourself away from him. You felt by him the way the disciples felt by the Master. You may not know it right then, but when you got home to yourself, and got to thinking what he had said, you would just have to be a follower of him, that’s all.”10
The work was slow, but over the next four years the union grew to nearly seven thousand members. Randolph learned that the rank and file didn’t like it when he criticized the company, to which they still felt loyal. They did not share his more general critique of capitalism, so he changed tactics. He made it a fight for dignity. Randolph also decided he would reject all donations from sympathetic whites. This would be a victory blacks would organize and win on their own.
Then the Depression hit, and the company struck back, firing or threatening any employee who voted to strike. By 1932, union membership was down to 771. Offices had closed in nine cities. Randolph and the headquarters staff were evicted for failure to pay rent. Randolph’s salary, which had been ten dollars a week, fell to nothing. Always a polished, sharp-dressed man, his clothes became tattered and worn. Union activists were beaten in cities from Kansas City to Jacksonville. In 1930 an Oakland loyalist named Dad Moore wrote a determined letter a month before his death:
My back is against the wal but I will Die before I will Back up one inch. I am fiting not for myself but for 12,000 porters and maids, and there children…. I has bin at Starvasion Door but it had not change my mind, for just as the night folows the Day we are gointer win. Tell all the men in your Dist that they should folow Mr. Randolph as they would follow Jes Christ.11
Nonviolent Resistance
The black press and the black churches turned against the union for being overly aggressive. In New York, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia offered Randolph a city job paying $7,000 a year, but Randolph turned it down.
The tide turned in 1933 with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and a change in the labor laws. Still, company executives had trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that to settle the labor dispute they would have to sit down as equals with the black porters and their representatives. It wasn’t until July 1935 that the company and union leadership met in a room in Chicago to begin negotiations. An agreement was finally reached two years later. The company agreed to a reduction in the work month from 400 to 240 hours and agreed to increase the company’s total pay package by $1,250,000 a year. Thus ended one of the longest and most bitter labor fights of the twentieth century.
By this time Randolph was the most famous African American organizer in the country. Having broken decisively with the Marxism of his youth, he spent the next years in a series of brutal fights to purge Soviet-dominated organizations from the labor movement. Then, in the early 1940s, with the country mobilizing for war, a new injustice pressed down on the black community. The factories were hauling in workers in droves to build planes, tanks, and ships, but they were not hiring blacks.
On January 15, 1941, Randolph issued a statement calling for a giant march on Washington if this discrimination was allowed to continue. “We loyal Negro American citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country,” he declared. He formed the March on Washington Committee and realistically expected they could bring ten thousand or perhaps twenty or thirty thousand blacks together for a protest march on the Mall.
The prospect of the march alarmed the nation’s leadership. Roosevelt asked Randolph to come see him for a meeting at the White House.
“Hello, Phil,” the president said when they were together. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”
“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President,” Randolph responded.
“I was sure you did. Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”
“That’s right, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt launched into a series of jokes and political anecdotes, but Randolph eventually cut him off.
“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries.”
Roosevelt offered to call some company heads and urge them to hire blacks.
“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph replied. “We want something concrete…. We want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”
“Well, Phil, you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end of other groups coming here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Questions like this can’t be settled with a sledgehammer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.” Randolph, bluffing a bit, vowed to bring a hundred thousand marchers.
“You can’t bring a hundred thousand Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt protested, “somebody might get killed.”
Randolph insisted. The impasse lasted until Mayor La Guardia, who was at the meeting, jumped in. “It is clear Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march, and I suggest we all begin to seek a formula.”12 Six days before the march was due to take place, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industries. Randolph called off the march, amid much opposition from civil rights leaders who wanted to use it to push other causes such as discrimination in the armed forces themselves.
After the war, Randolph pushed more broadly for worker rights and desegregation. His great power, as always, derived from his obvious moral integrity, his charisma, his example as an incorruptible man in service to a cause. He was, however, not a meticulous administrator. He had trouble concentrating his energies on a single cause. The unabashed admiration he inspired in the people around him could threaten organizational effectiveness. “There is, especially in the National Office, an unhealthy degree of leader-worship of Mr. Randolph,” one outside analyst of the 1941 March on Washington organization observed, “which paralyzes action and prevents an intelligent working out of policy.”13