A. Philip Randolph, labor leader and Harlem journalist, discusses the theatrical scene in Harlem in the 1930s. Randolph, best known as the organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African American union, had come to Harlem in 1911 so that he could become an actor. In 1917, together with Columbia student Chandler Owen, he began to edit and publish the socialist magazine The Messenger, which combined writing about radicals and union news with literary criticism and other writing by well-known African American intellectuals, including Paul Robeson and Claude McKay.

Read Oral History