TWO HARLEM STREETS HONOR CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS: A. Philip Randolph Blvd. and W. E. B. DuBois Ave. introduced Saturday.

       The New York Times reports that all of 145th Street was named A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, in honor of the labor and political leader, while the length of Bradhurst Avenue, running from West 141st Street to 155th Street, was named W. E. B. DuBois Avenue, after the scholar and writer who also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.      

       Both legends were longtime residents of Harlem, though neither lived there when he died. They also did not live on the streets that are named after them, but “they walked those streets,” said Anthony Harmon, the president of the New York chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. “They were part of that community.”       

       Randolph helped unionize black workers and led the all-black International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a significant force in the civil rights movement.
 
       The street namings, which were pushed largely by the Harlem Historical Society, were approved by the City Council and signed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last year.

       DuBois died in Accra, Ghana, in 1963, one day before the “I Have a Dream” speech of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the time of Randolph’s death in 1979, he had lived in a Chelsea building affiliated with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for well over a decade.