Philip Randolph Quotes

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they do not know each other; they do not know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated.

I asked her who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to her.

I believe as Dr. King and A.Philip Randolph and others taught you – that we’re one people. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re white or Black, Latino, Asian American or Native American. That maybe our foremothers and forefathers all came here in different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now. John, you understood the words of Dr. King when you said we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters. If not, we will perish as fools.

[FDR] Roosevelt did issue an important executive order in 1941 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to combat discrimination in the defense industry, which avoided a threatened march on Washington led by the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. With Roosevelt’s death, on April 12 1945, and the assumption of the presidency by Vice President Harry Truman, civil rights leaders hoped that the new leader might be more willing to publicly embrace their cause.

Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.

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By mid-September, after postponing the start of his concert tour until October 24, Paul was leading a crusade against lynching. When Walter White and most other leaders of the black establishment, such as A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Mary McCleod Bethune, refused to back such an initiative, Paul asked W. E. B. DuBois and Albert Einstein to join him in a national call for a mass protest meeting in Washington, D.C. They agreed,

African American labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph made this distinction in 1958 by labeling what came to be called backlashes as “counterrevolutions,” purposeful efforts to undo and reverse social change. In doing so, he reversed the backlash framing that posited civil rights activism as their cause. Instead, he described backlashers as the active, not passive, agents of reaction: “Just as the counter revolution against the Civil War revolution nullified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of 1865, the 14th Amendment of 1868, and the 15th Amendment of 1870, the second counter has begun in massive and ominous dimensions.” For Randolph, backlashers acted to “nullify” civil rights advances; they were not forced to do so.

This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn't integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over, And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. You had one right here in Detroit- I saw it on television- with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns. I know you don't like what I'm saying, but I'm going to tell you anyway. 'Cause I can prove what I'm saying. If you think I'm telling you wrong, you bring me Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer and those other three, and see if they'll deny it over a microphone. No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. When James Baldwin came in from Paris, they wouldn't let him talk, 'cause they couldn't make him go by the script. Burt Lancaster read the speech that Baldwin was supposed to make; they wouldn't let Baldwin get up there, 'cause they know Baldwin's liable to say anything. They controlled it so tight- they told those...what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make; and then told them to get out town by sundown