Born: April 15, 1889, Crescent City, FL

Education: Cookman Institute, graduated 1907; City College of New York, New York University, 1911

Died: May 16, 1979, New York, NY

A major spokesman, Randolph argued that labor organizing and economic empowerment were essential to race and class equality. He and Chandler Owen cofounded The Messenger (1917), a socialist magazine, which assailed segregation, lynching, and the draft. It urged union organizing.

Randolph pursued racial and economic justice. He organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1925), the first recognized black trade union. It gained recognition from the Pullman Palace Car Company, the nation's largest employer of blacks, by 1934. It won its second contract in 1937 and merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (1978). As president of the National Negro Congress (1935–40), Randolph pushed civil rights unionism.

In 1941 he organized the March on Washington Movement to fight for black inclusion in national defense jobs and freedom. He canceled its planned mass march when the president ordered the creation of the Committee on Fair Employment Practice. His leadership helped blacks to obtain a presidential order desegregating the military (1948). He became vice president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (1955). Randolph and his assistant, activist Bayard Rustin, were the architects of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963). Randolph received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964).