Black workers built the American economy from its very foundation — as enslaved laborers whose uncompensated work produced the cotton, tobacco, and sugar that fueled national wealth, and later as free laborers whose work was still routinely underpaid, unprotected, and unwelcome in the very unions that claimed to speak for the working class. The labor movement that gave us Labor Day was, for decades, a movement that Black workers had to fight to be let into.
This is the story of how that fight produced one of the most important labor organizations in American history — and how it became inseparable from the civil rights movement itself.
Essential Labor, Excluded Workers
After emancipation, Black workers moved into nearly every corner of the American economy — agriculture, domestic work, railroads, steel, meatpacking, the docks. Their labor was essential to industries that powered the nation’s growth. But many of the era’s craft unions, including large parts of the American Federation of Labor, either barred Black workers outright or relegated them to separate, weaker locals with little bargaining power.
This left Black workers in an impossible position: their labor was indispensable to the economy, but the organizations built to protect workers’ rights often refused to protect them. In response, Black workers did what excluded workers have always done — they organized on their own.
A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Nowhere was this independent organizing more consequential than among Pullman porters — the Black men who staffed the sleeping cars of America’s railroads, a job that was, at the time, one of the largest sources of employment for Black men in the country. Pullman porters worked brutally long hours for low wages and were expected to perform a kind of constant, deferential service that the company itself built into the job’s identity.
In 1925, labor organizer A. Philip Randolph took on the enormous task of unionizing these porters, founding the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It took twelve years of organizing, company resistance, and internal struggle before the Pullman Company formally recognized the union in 1937 — making it the first Black-led labor union to sign a collective bargaining agreement with a major American corporation.
That victory mattered far beyond the railroads. It proved that Black workers could build powerful, independent labor institutions — and it positioned Randolph as one of the most important labor and civil rights strategists of the twentieth century.
From the Union Hall to the National Stage
Randolph’s influence didn’t stop at the negotiating table. In 1941, he threatened to organize a massive march on Washington to protest discrimination in the defense industry, pressuring President Roosevelt into signing an executive order banning discriminatory hiring in defense work and federal agencies. It was an early demonstration of a strategy that would define the next two decades: using the collective power of organized labor as leverage for civil rights.
That strategy reached its fullest expression in 1963. Randolph was a chief architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — and it’s worth sitting with that full name. This wasn’t only remembered today as the march where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.” It was explicitly a labor march, organized in large part by labor leaders, demanding not just an end to segregation but fair wages, job protections, and economic opportunity for Black Americans.
Randolph opened the March on Washington himself, framing it from the very start as a demand for both civil rights and economic justice — a reminder that for Black workers, those two demands had never really been separate.
Why Labor Rights and Civil Rights Were Never Two Different Fights
It’s tempting, looking back, to treat labor history and civil rights history as two separate stories that occasionally intersect. But for Black workers, that separation never really existed. Being denied a union card and being denied a seat at a lunch counter came from the same source, and the fight against one was always tangled up with the fight against the other.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is a reminder of what independent organizing under impossible conditions can accomplish. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is a reminder that the biggest, most remembered moment of the civil rights movement was, at its core, also a labor demonstration.
A Note on the Food of the March
There’s a detail from August 28, 1963 that rarely makes it into the history books, but says a great deal about the conditions organizers were working against: because so many restaurants along the route into Washington were segregated and unwelcoming — or simply unwilling to serve the scale of the crowd — many attendees carried their own food for the day. Fried chicken, packed cold in box lunches, became one of the most common meals carried by marchers that day: portable, filling, and resilient in the summer heat, it was food built for people who couldn’t count on being served where they were going.
It’s a small, practical detail, but it captures something real about the day: even the meal people ate while marching for equality was shaped by the inequality they were marching against.
A Recipe for the Occasion: March on Washington Box Lunch Fried Chicken
This version is built the way a box lunch had to be in 1963 — cooked ahead, meant to travel, and just as good cold or at room temperature as it is warm.
- 8 bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces (thighs and drumsticks work well for travel)
- 2 cups buttermilk
- 1 tbsp hot sauce
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
- Salt and black pepper to taste
- Neutral oil, for frying (peanut or vegetable oil)
Instructions
- Combine the buttermilk and hot sauce in a large bowl. Add the chicken pieces, cover, and marinate in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, ideally overnight.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, salt, and pepper.
- Remove the chicken from the buttermilk, letting excess drip off, and dredge each piece thoroughly in the seasoned flour, pressing the coating on firmly.
- Heat about 2 inches of oil in a heavy skillet or Dutch oven to 325°F.
- Fry the chicken in batches, turning occasionally, until deep golden brown and cooked through (about 12–15 minutes per batch, depending on piece size). Internal temperature should reach 165°F.
- Drain on a wire rack, not paper towels — this keeps the crust from steaming and going soft, which matters if it’s going to travel.
- Let cool completely before packing. Fried chicken cooked this way holds beautifully at room temperature for several hours, which is exactly what made it the right food for a long, hot day of marching.
The labor movement that gave us Labor Day was never one unified story — it was built, contested, and expanded by workers who had to fight their way into it. Black workers didn’t wait for an invitation. They built their own institutions, won their own victories, and eventually helped lead one of the largest demonstrations in American history — one that was, from its very name, about jobs as much as it was about freedom.
(This is Part 2 of a four-part series on the people and struggles behind Labor Day. Part 3 looks at Latinx farmworkers, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the Delano grape strike.)