Black History Month Spotlight: 
A. Phillip Randolph

He was called the most dangerous Black in America.

He led 250,000 people in the historic 1963 March on Washington.

He spoke for all the dispossessed: Blacks, poor whites, Puerto Ricans, Indians and Mexican Americans.

He won the fight to ban discrimination in the armed forces.

He organized the 1957 prayer pilgrimage for the civil rights bill.

He was President Emeritus of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union he built.

And he was a former City College student.

The words and deeds of A. Philip Randolph show us the unyielding strength of his life-long struggle for full human rights for the Blacks and all the disinherited of the nation.

At the heart of A. Philip Randolph's vision as a socialist was his belief that a decent and well-paying job is the first step towards social and political freedom. Therefore, while he supported the needs of Blacks as Blacks, Mr. Randolph also maintained that those who are poor, whether they are Black or white, have basic interests in common, and that they should join together.

As a socialist, Mr. Randolph believed that workers and their labor unions are the key forces in any political effort to redistribute society's wealth more justly. He did not see the problem of Black people in America as the problem of one isolated group. He viewed the condition of American Blacks as the symptom of a larger social illness, an illness caused by an unfair distribution of power, wealth, and resources.

The agent for spreading Mr. Randolph's socialism was a magazine called the MESSENGER (after which this newspaper is named), founded in 1917, "The only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes."

To learn more about A. Philip Randolph, you can visit the web site of the A. Philip Randolph Institute or read the book A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait by Jervis Anderson, University of California Press.