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Revolt Against Jim Crow A. Philip Randolph may 1948 It was on March 31, 1948, that Grant Reynolds and I startled the assorted members of the Senate Armed Services Committee by promising to lead a civil disobedience movement against any conscription legislation based on segregation of Negroes. I speak of “assorted” Senators because the committee has a mixture of Southern reactionaries, Northern conservatives, and at least one Republican liberal. As the country well knows by now, it was Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon who raised persistently the legal doctrine of treason. We made it plain that legal technicalities and the prospect of dire consequences were not going to stop the movement against Jim Crow conscription which has become the last resort for self-respecting Negroes. This new technique in race relations—this announced intention to withdraw support from discriminatory institutions and to quarantine Jim Crow, this prospect of acute humiliation in the eyes of the world—has jolted the government and the military clique into feverish e¤orts to convince themselves and the country that Reynolds and I did not represent Negro sentiment. Their e¤orts are predestined to disappointment, fortunately. I pointed out to the committee that many Negro veterans said “never again” as they kissed Army life goodbye . Regardless of any organized movement, it is certain that there would be spontaneous resistance to a draft based on racial discrimination and segregation. But even the almost illiterate youth who have been writing me penciled notes of thanks show that they grasp the essence of our civil disobedience proposal—namely, that a Jim Crow America, and particularly a Jim Crow Army, is not the proper instrument to spread democracy and peace across the universe, and that our submission again to military segregation would be the height of folly and the acme of futility. Regardless of one’s position on peacetime conscription per se—and my union is on record against it—segregation is an unmitigated evil in itself, and if the country is going to be aºicted with the poison of militarism, the supreme irony of a Jim Crow Army must be brought to an abrupt end. —A. Philip Randolph, a civil rights and labor rights leader, founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph / Revolt Against Jim Crow 109 ...

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