At 74, A. (Asa) Philip Randolph (1889-1979), the founder and president of the powerful union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, approached the planning of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with the full knowledge of the impact it would have. More than two decades earlier, in 1941, Randolph had threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a similar peaceful demonstration, “A Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense.”

Despite an all-out effort by President Roosevelt to convince Randolph to cancel the march, the activist refused to budge, and in June Roosevelt – with great reluctance—signed Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in hiring for defense industries as well as federal bureaus, and including civil service jobs. The order created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to receive complaints, investigate charges of discrimination and take action – though it possessed no enforcement powers – to resolve outstanding problems.The march, to be held July 1, promised to be quite a spectacle with 100,000 people predicted to descend on the nation’s capital—a nightmare for the Roosevelt Administration that feared racial violence and the embarrassment it would cause in front of the rest of the world. The president’s authority undermined by his own citizens was bad at any time, but a disaster with America’s allies at war.

Randolph had wanted to integrate the military, but conceded when military top brass refused to experiment with desegregation; it would have to wait until after World War II. Randolph called off the march, but he, along with a younger activist named Bayard Rustin would be at it again, successfully petitioning President Harry S Truman to sign, in 1948, an Executive Order 9981 desegregating the military.