A. PHILIP RANDOLPH

A. Philip Randolph came to national prominence by organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and achieved the first union contract signed by a white employer and an African American labor leader (in 1937). In 1941, he conceived a march on Washington, DC, to protest exclusion of African American workers from defense jobs. Faced with the public relations threat of 100,000 marchers, President Franklin Roosevelt established the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee. Randolph founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, which in 1948 pressured President Harry Truman into ending segregation in the armed forces. Although in later years he became less militant, Randolph was a dedicated socialist from his college days in New York. His lifelong belief in unionism and integration flowed from that philosophy, and he went into action in 1917 by co-founding The Messenger, a weekly magazine of African-American protest, and lecturing across the country. For his outspoken leadership, Randolph's opponents characterized him as "the most dangerous Negro in America" because of his proven power to create change. He was still the acknowledged patriarch into the early 1970s and into his 80s, after his key role in organizing the historic, 250,000 strong March on Washington in 1963.

BAYARD RUSTIN

The pacifist Bayard Rustin was committed to nonviolent strategies for working toward racial equality and economic justice. In the mid-1930s, seeking an organization that shared his opposition to war and racism, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL). In 1941, Rustin left the YCL and began a 12-year association with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist, religious organization devoted to solving world problems through nonviolent means. As the FOR youth secretary, and then as director of its Department of Race Relations, Rustin served as an organizer for A. Philip Randolph's 1941 March on Washington. The demonstration convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which stipulated that all employers and unions with government defense contracts must cease racial discrimination and established a Committee on Fair Employment Practices to enforce the order. The following year, with James Farmer, he helped to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge Jim Crow by nonviolent direct action. A conscientious objector to military service, Rustin was imprisoned for resisting the draft in 1943 and served nearly two and a half years in the Ashland Correction Institute and Lewisburg Penitentiary. Rustin died in 1987.

NORMAN HILL

Norman Hill was a union organizer noted for his commitment to civil rights. From 1964 to 1967, Mr. Hill served as Legislative Representative and Civil Rights Liaison of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. He helped to coordinate Dr. Martin Luther King's six-city 1964 get-out-the-vote tour. He lobbied to increase the minimum wage and was in the labor delegation on the Selma-Montgomery March against racial discrimination in voting in the deep South. In 1965 Mr. Hill was one of the key planners of the Joint Apprenticeship Program, sponsored by APRI and the Workers Defense League. This program became the Recruitment and Training Program and was dedicated to the interest of minority participation in the building trades and construction industry.