Randolph Blackwell

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. Coretta Scott King described him as an "unsung giant" of nonviolent social change.

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. the shooting brought national media attention to the struggle in the south, energized the civil rights movement, and forced the Kennedy administration to investigate. 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.

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,

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.