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A. Philip Randolph Heads the 1963 March on Washington

Of the thousands of people who go in and out of Boston’s Back Bay commuter rail station every day, how many pass the bronze statue of A. Philip Randolph with no idea that the 1963 March on Washington was his idea?

Randolph was both a great labor leader and a great civil rights leader, not coincidental when you consider racial justice means nothing without economic justice. At least that’s what Randolph – and his protégé Martin Luther King, Jr., thought. The 1963 March on Washington was, after all, the March for Jobs and Freedom.

Leaders of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph is seated in the center; John Lewis is second from right. Photo courtesy National Archives.

King called Randolph the “truly the dean of the Negro leaders.”

Randolph is credited with pushing President Franklin Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry and President Harry Truman to integrate the military. Considered the most important black leader in the 1930s and 1940s, he helped bring thousands of railroad sleeping car porters into the middle class.

Though Randolph grew up in Jacksonville, lived in New York City and made his mark on Washington, he also had an impact in Boston’s African-American community. Even today, his nine-foot sculpture in the train station may inspire commuters who take the time to read his words at the base: “Freedom is never granted; It is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.”

A. Philip Randolph

Randolph was born in Crescent City, Fla., on April 15, 1889, to a poor minister and a seamstress. He grew up in Jacksonville, where he and his brother graduated from an academic high school for African Americans.

He moved to New York in 1911, where he got involved in the labor movement and started a magazine called The Messenger. People considered it radical because it opposed lynching, the military draft and segregation.

A. Philip Randolph in 1942

Randolph got a taste of organizing in 1914, when he took a job as a waiter aboard a steamboat, the Paul Revere, which ran between Fall River and New York. He lied about his experience, and then he messed up one of his orders. He was reprimanded and put on probation.

Waiters and kitchen help had to sleep in a cramped, foul space below deck– the so-called “glory hole.” Randolph tried to organize the kitchen staff and waiters to demand improved sleeping conditions. Instead, he got fired on his return to New York.

A Fall River Line steamer, The Pilgrim

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

In 1925, a group of Pullman porters approached Randolph in Harlem and asked them to help form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The porters worked for the Pullman Company, which had a virtual monopoly on running railroad sleeping cars. The company, which only hired black men as porters, had more black employees than any other U.S. company.

Randolph accepted the challenge, with the motto, “Fight or Be Slaves.”

A Pullman porter, Chicago, 1943. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

George Walker of Marlboro, Mass., a porter, joined that first year, risking dismissal by the company. He earned $67 a month for 400 hours. “You ain’t supposed to get any sleep,” one Pullman porter testified before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915.

Within a year, 3,000 Pullman porters — 51 percent — joined the union, but the company refused to negotiate or even recognize it. Federal mediators ignored the Brotherhood’s complaints. In 1926, Randolph planned a strike, but when he heard the company had 5,000 strikebreakers on hand, he called it off.

That cost the union half of its members. Then came the Great Depression, and membership fell to 658 in 1933.

Organizing Boston

Randolph realized he needed community support, because, he said, the company “cannot stand up against the Brotherhood and the Community too.” In Boston, he enlisted the help of the black churches and local civic organizations.

A. Phillip Randolph in 1963

A music professor, John Orth, helped organize a citizen’s committee of black and white New Englanders to support Randolph’s cause. They included Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard professor, and journalist William Monroe Trotter. The committee put out pamphlets proclaiming their faith in the justice of the cause of the Pullman porters, including one that linked Randolph’s cause with New England’s ‘glorious and illustrious’ abolitionist heritage.

Randolph also needed President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed a fair labor law in 1934 that gave the Brotherhood more legal protection. Membership grew to 7,000 and forced the Pullman Company to the bargaining table.

William Monroe Trotter

Finally, A Contract

By 1937, the union negotiated its first contract with the Pullman Company. George Walker got a raise to $89.50 a month. By the end of World War II, porters earned $175 a week.

“Working on the trains was what helped me educate my children,” said Bennie Bullock of Mattapan in a 1980s interview. Bullock echoed the experience of other Boston porters. His three children all had college educations and went on to professional careers.

A. Philip Randolph statue in Boston Back Bay’s train station.

1941 March on Washington

On Jan. 25, 1941, Randolph began to organize a march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in defense industries. Using his contacts in the labor movement, the black media and the black churches, March on Washington Movement chapters formed throughout the country. By spring, Randolph estimated the July 1 march would attract 100,000 people.

President Franklin Roosevelt caved. A week before the scheduled march, he issued Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Flyer from the 1941 March on Washington. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Randolph called off the march, but vowed to fight on.

“Unless this war sound the death knell to the old Anglo-American empire systems, the hapless story of which is one of exploitation for the profit and power of a monopoly-capitalist economy, it will have been fought in vain,” he said.

A. Philip Randolph Leads the 1963 March

Randolph organized more protest marches over the next few decades. In 1948 he called for young black men to resist the draft, reestablished then as the Selective Service System. President Harry Truman, needing black votes to win election, issued Executive Order 9981, which integrated the military.

Randolph led several other protests during the 1950s. In 1960 he helped organize the Negro American Labor Council and served as its president. Along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NALC initiated the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Randolph, by then in his mid-70s, served as the titular head of the march. He recruited a 51-year-old labor activist, Bayard Rustin, to organize the event. Rustin and his team of 200 activists publicized the march, recruited marchers and scheduled platform speakers. They planned logistics down to the last detail: how many toilets would 250,000 people need, how many first aid stations, how much they should bring to eat.

On Aug. 28, 1963, 250,000 people, black and white, showed up in Washington, D.C. Many celebrities came, too, including Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, Lena Horne, Paul Newman and Sammy Davis, Jr. Marian Anderson sang He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sang Blowin’ in the Wind.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew 250,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963.

A. Philip Randolph delivered the opening and closing remarks, calling the marchers “the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech as the last speaker. It has overshadowed much of what happened that day, including the purpose of the march: economic equality.

Aftermath

President Lyndon Johnson awarded Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

A. Philip Randolph receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson.

After decades of leading the civil rights movement, Randolph died in his apartment on May 16, 1979. On Oct. 8, 1988, retired Pullman car operators and dining car waiters attended the unveiling of the statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston’s Back Bay train station.

The Library of Congress created an online exhibit. ‘A Day Like No Other,’ commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Click here.

Photo of A. Philip Randolph statue courtesy Boston MBTA under Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 2.0.

With thanks to A. Philip Randolph and Boston’s African-American Railroad Workers by James R. Green and Robert C. Haydn. This story was updated in 2022.

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Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean, Mad Brahmin Artist

For half her life, Margarett Sargent struggled against the strictures and demands of her Boston Brahmin upbringing. Then for the other half, she succumbed to it – and to madness and alcoholism.

A fourth cousin of another painter, John Singer Sargent, she suddenly abandoned her promising art career at the age of 44. Instead, she turned her passionate attention to gardening. Well, also to men. And to women.

“For twenty years, I worked,” she told her granddaughter. “And then I devoted myself to horticulture.”

Margarett Sargent in 1916

Margarett Sargent

She was born on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay in on Aug. 31, 1892 to Francis Sargent and Jane Welles Hunnewell. Her maternal grandfather, Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, was a railroad baron who spent much of his spare time importing and cultivating rhododendrons. Margarett took more pride in her paternal ancestors, who she viewed as more distinguished. The first Sargent had arrived in Massachusetts in 1689.

Margarett Sargent grew into an elegant beauty, nearly six feet tall. She had luxurious black hair, skin like marble and startling light blue eyes. And she had wit. One admirer later wrote, “Her words were swift as swallows in a gale…she was a blue brook broken to a thousand … bubbles by every conversational stone or water-soaked log of stupidity.”

She got kicked out of private school at the age of 16, so her family sent her to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Conn. After boarding school she agreed to marry Eddie Morgan, a handsome, brilliant, rich friend of her brother’s.

Morgan was devoted to her, but also to alcohol and horses. She broke off the engagement because, she said, she wanted to go to Italy to sculpt.

Margarett Sargent never forgot Eddie Morgan, though.

Art Career

She spent a year studying art in Florence, something her family wished she hadn’t done.

When she returned to Boston in 1914, she studied with a rising young sculptress named Bashka Paeff. Margarett Sargent had talent and she worked hard at her art. In 1916, she began to reap the rewards, with two works exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. A year later, she showed two more at the National Academy of Design.

In 1917, she went to study with Gutzon Borglum in Connecticut. There she met and befriended George Luks – a barroom brawling member of the Ashcan School of art. He later painted her portrait from memory, and called it The White Blackbird – a title her granddaughter would use in a biography of her.

Margarett Sargent, The White Blackbird by George Luks

In 1919 she moved to New York, where she took an apartment with a friend – and probably lover – named Marjorie Davenport. She pursued avant-garde painting and sculpture and hung out with Harpo Marx and her downstairs neighbor, Fanny Brice.

Her Bohemian revel was short lived, however. The next year she married Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, another Brahmin from an old New England family. He succeeded at dog breeding and polo playing, but business, not so much. Fortunately for him, his mother gave him an allowance to help pay for their 13 servants.

Pride’s Crossing

While attending Harvard Law School, Shaw McKean bought a First Period saltbox house in Beverly, Mass., with his friends Bayard Warren and Cole Porter.

The house, built in 1630 had first belonged to the King’s tax collector. Later, General Burgoyne appropriated it during the American Revolution.

Shaw McKean bought this house, known as the Samuel Corning House, with Cole Porter

McKean eventually bought out his two friends. He and Margarett expanded the house and property into a 54-acre estate and Yankee palace, which included a large studio for her. Shaw encouraged her art, and they had four children in three years.

But her family and friends knew what McKean also probably knew: He felt much more strongly about Margarett Sargent than Margarett Sargent felt about him. And he didn’t help matters by raping her on her wedding night, at least according to her recollection.

Both had extramarital affairs.

The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean

“Margarett was a highly sexed woman,” said one of her friends.

She would arrive in New York, check into a hotel and telephone her old beau Eddie Morgan at the New York Stock Exchange.

“Eddie, I’m here,” she’d say, and he’d rush from the stock exchange floor, ready for red-hot sex.

She was admired, and probably not from afar by the newly married Archibald MacLeish. And the ‘wonderfully handsome’ Isabel Pell, an heiress who joined the French Resistance during World War II. And the novelist Jane Bowles.

As a virginal recent Harvard graduate, John Walker was staying at Pride’s Crossing one night when Margarett, twice his age, came into his bedroom in a negligee. She seduced him, not unwillingly. He went on to serve as director of the National Gallery of Art.

All the while Margarett Sargent McKean had been collecting modern art and creating it herself. She had a one-woman show in 1926 at the prestigious Krashaar Gallery in New York. She had her last exhibit in 1932 in Boston at the Doll and Richards Gallery.

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By the 1930s, her marriage had descended into bickering and shouting. Margarett crawled into the bottle. In 1936, she stopped painting. Margarett instead devoted herself to gardening, as had her Grandfather Hunnewell.

In 1944, she got committed to a sanitarium for the first time. Her husband left her in 1947 for a champion tennis player, Katherine Winthrop.

Margarett Sargent McKean went in and out of sanitariums for the rest of her life, even taking electroshock therapy.

Her minders decided she couldn’t live unsupervised, and so she went to live in a Commonwealth Avenue apartment with a nurse.

She died in a nursing home in 1978. Sixteen years later, a New York gallery held a retrospective of her work.

Her granddaughter Honor Moore asked her late in life why she had abandoned her art.

“It just got too intense,” she told her granddaughter.

With thanks to The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter.

Images: Samuel Corning house, By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20996685. This story was updated in 2022.

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