His focus in “The March on Washington” is on A. Philip Randolph, the longtime president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who from World War II into the mid-1960s was the universally acknowledged dean of American civil rights leaders. Seventy-four years old in 1963, Randolph had first come to nationwide — that is, white — attention in 1941, when his threat to stage a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination prompted Franklin Roosevelt to summon him to the White House and, just one week later, issue an executive order prohibiting workplace discrimination throughout defense industries. Roosevelt’s decisive action led Randolph to call off the scheduled march,
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