A. Philip Randolph: “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”

In the May 1941 issue of Black Worker, A. Philip Randolph, a prominent civil rights leader in his capacity as president of the National Negro Congress and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters labor union, issued a “Call to Negro America to March on Washington“ to demand an end to discrimination in the defense industry and in the military. His call, made in cooperation with the civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste, initiated the March on Washington Movement, which lasted until 1947. This movement influenced future civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., who joined with Randolph in 1963 to organize the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech). Randolph’s “call to Negro America” took place in the context of America’s transition from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the wartime economy that would employ millions of industrial workers during World War II.

Ultimately, the march Randolph envisioned never took place. Under pressure from civil rights leaders and out of his recognition that the United States would need all the manpower it could muster in the coming years, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in the defense industries and in the federal government. Accordingly, the number of African Americans employed in defense industries and government swelled, although the armed forces remained segregated throughout World War II. It would fall to Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry S. Truman, to desegregate the military by executive order in 1948—in large part because of the efforts of the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, which Randolph founded.