Monuments to individuals are generally built to honor their biggest achievement; indeed, that’s usually why one becomes eligible for a big stone marker to begin with.

In recent months DCist has visited Sonny Bono park, the Clark Griffith monument and Kahlil Gibran memorial, all of which reference the acts/circumstances/events for which they are primarily remembered. Other times, when an individual’s accomplishments are too numerous to convey visually, their monuments tend to be more abstract — think any one of the famous monuments to former presidents in the city, except for the didactic Franklin Delano Rooselvelt memorial.

This is what makes the A. Philip Randolph Memorial at Union Station unique: arguably (and we’ll hash this out a bit later) it was not built with his biggest legacy in mind.

Randolph grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., in the late 1800s. As a youngster he wanted to be an actor, and so moved to Harlem for college, where he enrolled at City College. Like many a college student, Randolph found politics — in his case, socialism. After graduation, and marriage, he became a labor organizer, and in 1925 founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This union became the first African-American labor union to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor. But not without a protracted fight.