Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - A. Philip Randolph

I had started the personalities portion of this series with Josephine Baker, but after looking at the HUGE list of names at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance, I was intrigued by the category "Leading Intellectuals" and decided to look at who those people were.  The first in this sub-series is A. Philip Randolph.

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From Wikipedia:

Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was a leader in the African-American civil-rights movement, the American labor movement, and socialist political parties.

He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly African American labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington Movement, which convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II. The group then successfully pressured President Harry S. Truman to issue Executive Order 9981 in 1948, ending segregation in the armed services.

In 1963, Randolph was the head of the March on Washington, which was organized by Bayard Rustin, at which Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech. Randolph inspired the Freedom budget, sometimes called the "Randolph Freedom budget", which aimed to deal with the economic problems facing the black community.

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I am somewhat sad to say that I don't recall ever knowing about A. Philip Randolph. I am sure that in all the many documentaries I have watched over the decades about the civil rights movement, that his name surely must have come up, but reading the wiki it was all new  to my memory.  I found it interesting that before he was an activist he had aspired to be an actor but let it go because his parents didn't approve. Instead he took that charisma and channeled it into motivating others to social change.  I think even as an actor, he probably would still have been motivated to political action for labor organization and human rights in addition to his theater and/or movie career.