Summary Overview

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.

Defining Moment

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, African Americans were initially skeptical of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Various provisions in these laws and the agencies they created continued a pattern of discrimination against African AmericansOver the course of the decade, though, some progress was made. By 1939 African Americans were beginning to benefit from New Deal programs, and their income from public sector employment was almost as large as their income in the private sector. Helping to spur this modest growth in black income was the union movement.

The position of unemployed African American workers in the late 1930s, however, remained dire. As the nation was emerging from the depression, white workers were able to return to full-time employment, but black workers continued to rely on relief programs and public sector jobs, primarily in construction and infrastructure building. However, war clouds were gathering over the horizon. On September 1, 1939, World War II began in Europe when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In preparation for the possibility of war, the United States instituted a peacetime draft, and under the Lend-Lease program, begun in 1941, the U.S. government began sending military supplies to England, China, Russia, and Brazil.

As the nation mobilized for the possibility of war, the unemployment rate fell below 10 percent for the first time since 1932. Industrial output was up in a variety of defense-related industries such as ship-building. African Americans, however, were getting only a handful of the new jobs being created. Accordingly, on January 15, 1941, labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph issued a press release in which he called on African Americans to protest this inequity by marching on Washington.

The date of the proposed march was to be July 1, 1941. The Roosevelt administration, alarmed by the prospect of tens of thousands of protesters descending on the nation’s capital, tried to dissuade Randolph from this course of action and call off the march. Randolph, however, remained steadfast, and in May of that year he redoubled his efforts with his “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense,” published in the journal Black Worker.

Author Biography

Asa Philip Randolph was born on April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, the son of a Methodist minister. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school class in 1907, he moved to New York City with the early goal of becoming an actor; in Harlem, he organized a Shakespearean society and performed the lead role in several of Shakespeare’s plays. During the 1910s he became a Socialist and began his earliest involvement in trade unionism. Along with his close friend and collaborator, Chandler Owen, he founded and edited The Messenger, a radical journal that espoused Socialism and trade unionism and urged African Americans to resist the military draft after the United States entered World War I.

During the 1920s Randolph’s involvement in trade unionism intensified, and in 1925 he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black trade union. By the mid-1930s the union had over seven thousand members. For a decade Randolph and the union carried on bitter negotiations with the Pullman Company, which operated the sleeping and dining railroad cars on which black porters and maids worked—often for low wages, with no overtime pay. Finally, in 1935, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was certified as the union that would represent the Pullman employees. Two years later the union reached an agreement with Pullman that provided workers with significant wage increases, overtime pay, and a shorter work week. Meanwhile, in 1936, Randolph was named the first president of the National Negro Congress.

In January 1941, as U.S. industrial output was increasing with the growing threat of American involvement in World War II, Randolph issued a call for a march on Washington, D.C., to demand equality of opportunity in the defense industries and in the U.S. military. He met with President Franklin Roosevelt in June of that year; as a result of that meeting, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which desegregated the defense industries and the federal government.

Document Analysis

Randolph’s “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense” is a highly rhetorical document consisting of a large number of short paragraphs and sentences that make his purpose absolutely clear. He sweeps his reader along with repetition and exclamations (“What a dilemma! What a runaround! What a disgrace!”) and such literary devices as alliteration (“deepest disappointments and direst defeats…dreadful days of destruction and disaster to democracy”)—all perhaps reflecting his early theatrical background. He announces his purpose in the opening paragraph of his address, where he says, “We call upon you to fight for jobs in National Defense. We call upon you to struggle for the integration of Negroes in the armed forces.” He then condemns “Jim-Crowism,” a reference to the pattern of discrimination and segregation that had existed since the nineteenth century and that kept African Americans in inferior social and economic positions; the phrase Jim Crow was taken from the name of a character in a popular nineteenth-century minstrel show.

Randolph stresses his view of the black employment situation as a “crisis,” indeed, a “crisis of democracy.” He goes on to note that African Americans are being systematically denied employment in the defense industries and that they are segregated in the U.S. military. Randolph was, of course, correct. In the early decades of the twentieth century, African Americans served primarily in menial and service jobs in the military. In the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, for example, African Americans were pushed into the Steward’s Branch, where they worked as cooks and waiters in officers’ mess halls. During World War II they fought in segregated units; the few black officers commanded segregated African American units. Many military officers argued that integrating units, and thus having blacks and whites serve side by side, would result in conflict and low morale. Randolph then goes on to point out that African American workers were caught on the horns of a dilemma: They could not get jobs because there were not members of unions, and they could not gain union membership because they were without jobs.

Midway into the essay, Randolph begins to express hope that the situation can be remedied; he foresees black Americans rising from their current position to new heights of achievement in the “struggle for freedom and justice in Government, in industry, in labor unions, education, social service, religion, and culture.” He then asserts that African Americans, through “their own power for self-liberation,” can break down “barriers of discrimination” and slay the “deadly serpent of race hatred” in the military, government, labor unions, and industry. Here, Randolph calls for efforts to provide unskilled African American workers with job training that will enable them to make a contribution.

Randolph also takes up a potential objection to the proposed march on Washington. Critics would argue that such a march at such a time, with war looming, might affect national unity. Randolph rejects this argument, arguing instead that “we believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens.” The paragraph goes on to reject all forms of dictatorship, including Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, and to emphasize that African Americans are “loyal, patriotic Americans all.” Interestingly, early in his career, during World War I, Randolph had been arrested for breaking the 1917 Espionage Act because of the left-wing Socialist ideals he espoused in the journal he founded, The Messenger. By the late 1930s Randolph was muting his Socialist beliefs, and here he makes clear that he regards the Communist Soviet Union as a dictatorship.

In the final paragraphs Randolph sums up his views. He states that American democracy would be a “hollow mockery” if it failed to protect its protectors and to extend equality of opportunity to all citizens, black and white. He again calls on President Roosevelt to end “Jim-Crowism” in the military and in the defense industry and closes by stating that if the federal government is guilty of discrimination, it has forfeited the right to take industry and the labor unions to task for the same discrimination.

Essential Themes

Randolph is explicit in explaining what he wants: not just an end to discrimination in all areas of the national defense establishment. This encompasses equitable hiring practices, pay, and working conditions in America’s industrial “Arsenal of Democracy” but also an end to discrimination within the fighting forces of the United States. Crucial to Philips’s efforts his specific call for an executive order from the president that will put an end to discrimination in the defense industry and the military. In the latter part of the essay, he notes that efforts on the part of the black community to gain jobs will not be easy and will require money and sacrifice. He calls on African Americans to take action, urging them to “build a mammoth machine of mass action” and to “harness and hitch” their power. He then arrives at his key goal: the organization of a march on Washington to demand economic equality. Randolph asserts that such a march will “shake up white America” and “shake up official Washington.” Further, the massing of thousands of black demonstrators will give encouragement not only to African Americans but also to “our white friends” who fight for justice by the side of African Americans.

As noted earlier, while the march did not take place, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations did issue executive orders that spoke to Randolphs’s concerns. While these efforts were, in many ways, flawed in the limited ways they could be implemented and enforced, this essay prefigures not only the civil rights gains that would be made in the 1940s and early 1950s within the national defense establishment, but also the wider story of the civil rights movement.

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