Randolph Blackwell
Randolph Blackwell - Former Director (1977 ? 1979) of the Minority Business Development Agency.
Born	( 1927-03-10 ) March 10, 1927 Greensboro, North Carolina
Died	May 21, 1981 (1981-05-21) (aged 54)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Director of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise
Known for	Veteran of the Civil Rights Movement
Spouse	Elizabeth Knox Blackwell
Children	1

Randolph T. Blackwell (March 10, 1927 ? May 21, 1981) was an American activist of the Civil Rights Movement , serving in Martin Luther King Jr. 's Southern Christian Leadership Conference , amongst other organizations. ^{[1] [2] [3]} Coretta Scott King described him as an "unsung giant" of nonviolent social change. ^[4]

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Blackwell's father was active in Marcus Garvey 's United Negro Improvement Association ; Randolph attended association meetings with his father, and visited the prison where Garvey was held. In 1943, inspired by hearing Ella Baker speak, he founded a youth chapter of the NAACP in Greensboro. As a student in sociology at North Carolina A & T University (from which he graduated in 1949) he made an unsuccessful run for the state assembly. ^[4] He earned a law degree from Howard University in 1953, took an assistant professorship at Winston-Salem Teacher’s College and then became an associate professor in 1954 at Alabama A & M College , where he taught government. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

While at Alabama A & M, Blackwell became a leader of the 1962 student sit-ins in nearby Huntsville, Alabama . He left academia in 1963 and became a field director in the Voter Education Project , an organization that promoted voter registration among blacks in the South. ^{[2] [3]} In March 1963, while attempting to register black voters in Greenwood, Mississippi with Bob Moses and Jimmy Travis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , the car they were driving was fired on. Blackwell and Moses escaped injury but Travis was shot and hospitalized; ^[5] the shooting brought national media attention to the struggle in the south, energized the civil rights movement, and forced the Kennedy administration to investigate. ^[6] Blackwell became the program director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1964, but after a disagreement with Hosea Williams , he left the organization in 1966 and became the director of Southern Rural Action, an anti-poverty organization in the Deep South . ^{[1] [2] [3] [7] [8]}

From 1977 to 1979, in the presidency of Jimmy Carter , Blackwell was director of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise in the U.S. Department of Commerce , ^{[2] [3]} but was beset there by charges of mismanagement. ^[9]

In 1976, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change gave him its Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, and in 1978 the National Bar Association gave him their Equal Justice Award. ^{[2] [3]}

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