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During the 1920s, black Pullman porters sought better wages and working conditions on traveling sleeper train cars.
One of America's earliest civil rights leaders, A. Philip Randolph, was asked to help.
To that end he founded the FIRST African American labor union in the United States
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car porters in 1925.
Almost forty years later, Randolph became the organizing force
behind the most famous Civil Rights march in American History.
Some called him the true "father of the civil rights movement" in the United States.
Randolph's incredible story is next on Marking History
This is the historical marker for Asa Philip Randolph, who was an early civil rights leader.
His marker is located here in Crescent City Florida in front of the church where his father was minister.
Over his career, Randolph worked with Presidents and civil right leaders
to push for desegregation and civil rights with his method of nonviolent confrontation.
Now let's learn more about his incredible story behind the marker.
After the Civil War, one job available for recently freed slaves was working on trains!
In an era of significant racial prejudice,
being a Pullman Porter was one of the best jobs available for African-American men.
Pullman's Luxury Cars were famous for the impeccable service and royal treatment provided by the staff.
Company founder George Pullman hired African American freedmen,
who were previously slaves in the South, as porters for his luxury cars.
These porters were trained to be valets and waiters, were paid relatively well
and got to travel all over US, which gained them a position of respect in the black community.
Pullman porters have been widely credited with contributing to the development of the black middle class in America.
By World War I, 12,000 porters were employed by the Pullman company.
George Pullman became the biggest single employer of African Americans in post-Civil War America.
Working for the Pullman Company was, however, less glamorous than the image the company promoted.
Black porters depended on tips for much of their income
which meant on the generosity of white passengers
who often called them all the same - "George", the first name of Mr. Pullman.
Pullman demanded 400 working hours a month or 11,000 miles -
sometimes as much as 20 hours at a stretch to earn a basic wage.
On August 25, 1925, 500 porters met in Harlem to organize a new labor union.
They approached the young and well-spoken publicist and newspaper editor of the “Messenger”,
A. Philip Randolph, and asked him to help.
Randolph agreed. Besides his standing as a labor organizer and civil rights activist,
Randolph was not a Pullman Company employee meaning the company could not fire him or buy him off.
That year, Randolph organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,
the first successful African- American labor union.
Their demands included a living wage instead of tipping, a 240- hour work month, and four to six hours of rest each night.
During the following years, Randolph became the most widely known spokesperson
for black working-class interests in the country.
And three, count them three, U.S. presidents got to learn first hand,
about Randolph's persuasive tactics to create social change.
In January 1941, Randolph lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order
abolishing discrimination in national defense jobs and ending Jim Crow laws in the military.
Roosevelt was not persuaded, so Randolph came up with a novel idea.
He organized the formation of “The March on Washington Movement,”
calling for 10,000 blacks to hold a rally on July 1 at the Lincoln Memorial.
Randolph's proposal was a radical shift away from the strategies of leading civil rights groups at the time.
By early summer, Randolph announced the number of expected participants had risen to 100,000.
You can image that Roosevelt was desperate to avoid the march.
“I called for a conference with the President.
And he said ‘Philip Randolph, we can't have one hundred thousand Negroes marching on Washington.
If anything such as that were to occur, you would not be able to manage them.
We might have bloodshed and death.'
He said ‘Now let's get down to business here and find out what can be done.'”
With only seven days to spare, Randolph called off the march.
In exchange, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802,
prohibiting discrimination of employment in defense industries and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee.
2 million blacks eventually found employment in wartime defense work.
Negroes want the same things that white citizens possess.
Seven years later, Randolph used the March on Washington Movement to pressure another president, Harry Truman,
to end Jim Crow laws in the military and integrate the armed forces.
Threatened with widespread racial tensions and needing the black vote in his 1948 re- election campaign,
President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, banning racial segregation in the armed forces.
In the 1960s, it was President Kennedy's turn to experience A. Philip Randolph.
Randolph finally realized his vision for a march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963
which attracted between 200,000 and 300,00 people to the nation's Capitol.
Although Kennedy had been pushing Congress for a new civil rights act since early 1963,
he initially did not support the event because of concern about the potential impact
of the March on his pending civil rights legislation.
The rally is often remembered as the high point of the civil rights movement.
Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers.
We are not a pressure group.
We are not a mob.
We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.
Later Randolph introduces the moral leader of the March, Dr. Martin Luther King.
I have a dream
that my four little children
will one day will live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
After the successful conclusion of the March, President Kennedy invited civil rights leaders to the White House
where they discussed the need for bi-partisan support of civil rights legislation.
After the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963,
the bill was left in the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson.
On July the Second, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.
The Civil Rights Act was a crucial step in achieving the civil rights movement's initial goal of full legal equality.
Three months later, on September 14, 1964
A. Philip Randolph was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
This award is the highest civilian honor given by the U.S. executive branch.
Due to his failing health, Randolph resigned his presidency of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
and retired from public life in 1968.
Asa Philip Randolph died in his Manhattan apartment on May 16, 1979 at age 90.
Today you can visit the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter museum in Chicago, IL. to celebrate his legacy.
Many will say that Asa Philip Randolph was the true "father of the civil rights movement" in the United States.
He felt that civil disobedience, nonviolent protests and mass demonstrations
were the best way to mobilize public pressure and create the social change that everyone deserves.
If history can be taught with stories
they can never be forgotten.
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