So abhorrent was the idea of thousands of Black workers marching on the United States capital in 1941 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to meet with the man who was organizing the demonstration—Asa Philip Randolph—and see if he could persuade him to stand down.  

At 52, Randolph already had a long history of organizing successfully on behalf of Black workers. While still in his 20s, Randolph became a force behind a Black employment agency in Harlem called the Brotherhood of Labor. He and his friend Chandler Owen founded The Messenger, a radical socialist magazine that was labeled “the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications” by the Justice Department during a crackdown on the Black press. In 1925, Randolph led the effort to form the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which represented nearly 10,000 Black railroad employees. Years later, his “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” written with Bayard Rustin and republished in The Atlantic, showed what a social safety net could look like.

Sensing a likely defeat in the negotiations, President Roosevelt signed an executive order banning racial discrimination in the national defense industry. In exchange, Randolph agreed to stop planning a march—but only temporarily. In 1963, he helped spearhead the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he told the crowd, “We shall return again and again to Washington in ever growing numbers until total freedom is ours. We shall settle for nothing less, and may God grant that we may have the courage, the strength, and faith in this hour of trial by fire never to falter.”