The group then successfully maintained pressure, so that President Harry S. Truman proposed a new Civil Rights Act and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948, promoting fair employment and anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring, and ending racial segregation in the armed services.

He was educated at Cookman Institute, then moved to New York City as part of the early Great Migration, leaving behind the discriminatory Jim Crow–era south.

He unsuccessfully ran for state office on the socialist ticket in the early 1920s, but found more success in organizing for African American workers' rights.

In 1963, Randolph was the head of the March on Washington, organized by Bayard Rustin, at which Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Randolph remembered vividly the night his mother sat in the front room of their house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went off to prevent a mob from lynching a man at the local county jail.

[4] In 1913, Randolph courted and married Lucille Campbell Green, a widow, Howard University graduate, and entrepreneur who shared his socialist politics.

[4] At this point, Randolph developed what became his distinctive form of civil rights activism, which emphasized the importance of collective action as a way for black people to gain legal and economic equality.

To this end, he and Owen opened an employment office in Harlem to provide job training for southern migrants and encourage them to join trade unions.

When it began publishing the work of black poets and authors, a critic called it "one of the most brilliantly edited magazines in the history of Negro journalism.

The railroads had dramatically expanded in the early 20th century, and the jobs offered relatively good employment at a time of widespread racial discrimination.

As a result of its perceived ineffectiveness, membership in the union declined;[4] by 1933 it had only 658 members and electricity and telephone service at headquarters had been disconnected because of nonpayment of bills.

[14] Randolph's belief in the power of peaceful direct action was inspired partly by Mahatma Gandhi's success using such tactics against British occupation in India.

In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, war industries, government agencies, and labor unions.

After he came to Memphis, Crump denied Randolph venues and intimidated local black leaders into declining speaking invitations by threatening them with jail.

When President Truman asked Congress for a peacetime draft law, Randolph urged young black men to refuse to register.

In 1950, along with Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, and Arnold Aronson,[21] a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, Randolph founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).

It coordinated a national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.Randolph and Rustin also formed an important alliance with Martin Luther King Jr.

[16] The protests, directed by James Bevel in cities such as Birmingham and Montgomery, provoked a violent backlash by police and the local Ku Klux Klan in the summer of 1963, which was captured on television and broadcast throughout the nation and the world.

"[23] Partly as a result of the violent spectacle in Birmingham, which was becoming an international embarrassment, the Kennedy administration drafted civil rights legislation aimed at ending Jim Crow once and for all.

King and Bevel deserve great credit for these legislative victories, but the importance of Randolph's contributions to the Civil Rights Movement is large.

[4] Nationwide, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s used tactics pioneered by Randolph, such as encouraging African Americans to vote as a bloc, mass voter registration, and training activists for nonviolent direct action.