Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida in 1889, the son of a Methodist minister. He moved to Harlem in 1911 and within a decade was the loudest socialist voice in Black America, publishing The Messenger and refusing to be quieted by the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, or Hoover administrations.

In 1925, sleeping-car porters working for the Pullman Company asked him to organize them into a union. White unions would not take them. The Pullman Company had broken every previous attempt. It took Randolph twelve years to win the first collective bargaining agreement signed by a Black-led union with a major American corporation. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first.

In 1941, with Black workers locked out of defense industry jobs, Randolph threatened to bring 100,000 Black Americans to march on Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 to prevent it — the first federal order banning racial discrimination in employment.

In 1948 he did it again. Refusing to register for a segregated draft, he forced President Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 desegregating the United States Armed Forces.

Fifteen years later, in 1963, he finally led the march he had been threatening since 1941. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew 250,000 to the Lincoln Memorial. Randolph opened the program. Dr. King closed it. Bayard Rustin had organized it in ten days.

Randolph served as Vice President of the AFL-CIO from 1957 until 1968. He founded the Negro American Labor Council in 1960 to push the federation to confront its own racism. When he died in 1979, Jimmy Carter said the labor movement had lost its founder.