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MARCH THREAT 
BY RANDOLPH

Declaring that "heads of government respond only to pressure" and that "Negroes must fight for what they get," A. Philip Randolph, international president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and national director of the March on Washington Movement, was the principal speaker at the Movement's second New York mass meeting Friday night. The Golden Gate Ballroom, Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street, was crowded when Mr. Randolph traced the history of the March on Washington Movement, its conferences with Mayor La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt which led up to the march being called off after a second conference, in which President Roosevelt and important members of the Cabinet met with a group of Negro leaders and discussed issues, which resulted in the President's Executive Order 8802 and creation of the FEPC. Attacking the recent transfer of the FEPC to the War Manpower Commission, Mr. Randolph served notice that the March on Washington Movement will "leave no stone unturned to preserve the integrity and organizational entity of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices." In winning the Executive Order for Negroes, Randolph declared that "the March on Washington Movement has learned that the Federal Government itself has become the carrier of the germ of race discrimination and segregation" and that "the Government and the President will respond to pressure and that the organization of the Negro masses can exercise pressure."

Denying that the March on Washington is abandoned, Mr. Randolph declared emphatically that "I have no doubt that a march on Washington will have to be made during the war to let the President and white America know that the Negro is not going to take a licking from Jim Crow lying down." Referring to the war effort, Mr. Randolph said that "Negroes made the blunder of closing ranks and forgetting their grievances in the last war. We are resolved that we shall not make that blunder again...If the President wants us to stop our agitation, than let him stop discrimination. Negroes have been pushed around long enough. We are not going to continue to take it, and we don't give a damn who doesn't like it."

[[image - black and white photograph of A. Philip Randolph]]

[[caption]] Brother A. Philip Randolph, prominent labor and civil rights leader, is President of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters which he organized in 1925; a Vice President of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and President of the Negro American Labor Council.

A native of Crescent City, Florida, he received his early education at Cookman Institute in Jacksonville and later attended City College in New York. For thirteen years, he was co-editor and publisher of THE MESSENGER, a journal of Negro life, stressing economics as the basis for the solution of the racial problem in America. He is now editor of THE BLACK WORKER, official Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Organ.

In 1942 he organized the March-on-Washington Movement, to aid in the elimination of discrimination against Negroes in defense industries. This movement led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, creating the President's Fair Employment Practice Committee, thereby initiating the concept of fair employment practice committees in American politico-economic life. He served as Director of the August, 1963 March on Washington which brought a quarter million people to the nation's capital in support of civil rights for all Americans.

He holds numerous university honorary degrees, and has been the recipient of many civic and fraternal awards, including the NAACP Spingarn Medal, for outstanding achievement in the field of race relations and civil rights, and, in 1964, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest citizen's award. [[/caption]]

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