Nation: The Most Dangerous Negro

A. Philip Randolph spoke for blacks with triumphant passion

With a rich baritone voice that seemed destined to command, an imperturbability under fire, a refusal to bend with the times or the fashions, A. Philip Randolph overcame opposition simply by being himself. The first national labor leader among American blacks, he forged the Pullman porters into a powerful union and pushed two Presidents into conceding crucial rights by threatening a march on Washington and resistance to the draft. Relatively inactive for many years before his death at 90 last week in Manhattan, Randolph seemed remote and perhaps irrelevant to younger civil rights leaders, but there are scarcely any nonviolent tactics in the whole arsenal of protest that he did not employ.

Asa Philip's father, James, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Crescent City, Fla., liked to recall the great days of Reconstruction, when blacks served in Congress. The boy was fired with a determination to recover that glory, and he learned early that there was no more potent weapon than the human voice. "I always liked to talk," he admitted. "Dad spoke beautifully and clearly. A word like 'responsibility' trembled with meaning the way he pronounced it." Though Randolph's youthful ambition to become an actor was thwarted by his parents, he memorized several of Shakespeare's tragedies and loved to recite them with rolling cadences.

After graduating from high school in Jacksonville, Randolph went north to the promised land of Harlem, which fell considerably short of expectations. He took odd jobs, attended night school at New York City College, and started reading Karl Marx aloud with the same enthusiasm that he showed for Shakespeare. Feeling that he now had an economic explanation for racial injustice, he joined others on the traditional soapbox to orate, as he put it, on "everything from the French Revolution and the history of slavery, to the rise of the working class. It was one of the great intellectual forums of America." He also started a radical magazine, The Messenger, which questioned why Negroes should fight in World War I when they were denied freedom at home. The Woodrow Wilson Administration, which moved to segregate the civil service, labeled Randolph the "most dangerous Negro in America." He was arrested in the same summer as Socialist Leader Eugene Debs, and spent two days in jail.

Stubbornly independent, Randolph was not swept up in the ideological currents of his time, resisting both Communism and the black nationalism of Jamaican Organizer Marcus Garvey. He kept his own counsel, shunning Harlem's high society and enjoying the company of his wife Lucille, a former beauty parlor operator whose sprightliness contrasted with his own solemnity.