thumb|right|220px|Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founder [[A. Philip Randolph, the public face of the union, in 1942]]

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (commonly referred to as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, BSCP) was a labor union in the United States. Founded in 1925, it was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The BSCP gathered a membership of 18,000 passenger railway workers across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The leaders of the BSCP—including A. Philip Randolph, its founder and first president, Milton Webster, vice president and lead negotiator, and C. L. Dellums, vice president and second president—became leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, especially concerning fair employment and continued to play a significant role in the movement after it focused on the eradication of segregation in the Southern United States. BSCP members such as E. D. Nixon were among the leadership of local desegregation movements by virtue of their organizing experience, constant movement between communities, and freedom from economic dependence on local authorities.

As a result of a decline in railway transportation in the 1960s, BSCP membership declined. It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC), now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.

Working for the Pullman Company was, however, less glamorous than the image the company promoted. Porters depended on tips for much of their income and thus on the generosity of white passengers who often referred to all porters as "George", the first name of George Pullman, the company's founder (see also Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George"). The company required porters to travel 11,000 miles, nearly 400 hours, per month to earn a basic wage. In 1934, porters on regular assignments worked an average of over 73 hours per week and earned 27.8 cents an hour while workers in manufacturing jobs averaged under 37 hours per week and earned an average of 54.8 cents per hour. They spent roughly ten percent of their time in unpaid "preparatory" and "terminal" set-up and clean-up duties, and they had to pay for their food, lodging, and uniforms, which could consume up to half of their wages. They were also charged whenever their passengers stole a towel or a water pitcher. Porters could ride at half fare on their days off—but not on Pullman coaches. They were not eligible for promotion to conductor, a job reserved for whites, despite frequently performing some of the conductor duties. Pullman hired exclusively black men as porters, stating that formerly enslaved black people were "trained as a race by years of personal service in various capacities, and by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness."

Organizing the union

thumb|right|250px|A Pullman Porter, photographed in Chicago in 1943

The AFL, despite touting equal rights for workers, was actively discriminatory. Furthermore, and foremost, white dominance remained entrenched in almost every institution that existed in the US, and these unpractical beliefs, both subtle and overt, precluded the white labor movement from recognizing the black workers or their organized fronts.

In the 1920s, as some elements within the AFL began to lower these barriers, groups as diverse as the Urban League, the Socialist Party of America and Communist Party began to focus on the rights of black workers. Randolph himself was a prominent member of the Socialist Party. From its inception, the BSCP fought to open doors in the organized labor movement in the US for black workers, even though it faced staunch opposition and blatant racism. As BSCP co-founder and First Vice President Milton Price Webster, put it, "...any time we have an American institution composed of white people there is prejudice in it....In America, if we should stay out of everything that's prejudiced we wouldn't be in anything."

As early as 1900, efforts were put forth by various collectives of Pullman porters to organize the porters into a union, each effort having been crushed by Pullman. In 1925, in the early days of organizing the BSP union, Randolph was invited, by BSCP union organizer Ashley Totten, to address the Porters Athletic Association, in New York City. Exhibiting a sound understanding of the plight of the black worker and the need for a genuine labor union, Randolph was asked to undertake the job of organizing the porters into a bona fide labor union. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched on the night of August 25, 1925. In 1934 the Roosevelt administration amended the RLA, then passed the Wagner-Connery Act, which outlawed company unions and covered porters, the following year.

A contract between the BSCP and the Pullman Company was signed on August 25, 1937. Many of these women had worked in New York's booming garment industry and gained experience in union activism within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which sought to increase African-American membership in the late 1920s. This adjunct organization focused on fundraising and disseminating pro-union information to the general public. Maids were often fired for union activism. Halena Wilson (1895–1975), president of the Chicago ILA, pushed the chapter to fight for wage and price controls and consumer cooperatives and against poll taxes. Frances Albrier organized her fellow Pullman maids during the 1920s, recalling: "Our responsibility was trying to educate the black public and black women" about the union.

In 1942, the union expanded divisions into the Canadian cities of Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg followed later by Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. There was widespread enthusiasm amongst Canadian workers for the adoption of BSCP.

Civil rights leadership

The BSCP won a charter from the AFL in 1935, the same year it was certified by the NMB. In the years before then, when the AFL refused to recognize the organization itself, Randolph accepted "federal local" status for a number of locals of the BSCP—an unsatisfactory compromise that assumed that these locals had no union of their own, and allowed them to affiliate directly with the AFL on that basis. That half-measure, however, allowed Randolph into AFL conventions and other meetings, where he advocated organization of black workers on an equal footing with whites. Randolph kept the BSCP in the AFL, where most of the railroad brotherhoods remained, after John L. Lewis led the split that resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Randolph expanded his agenda once he became the leader of the foremost black labor organization in the US. Randolph was chosen as the leader of the National Negro Congress, an umbrella organization founded in 1937 that united many of the major black civil rights organizations of the day. Randolph later resigned from the NNC in a dispute over policy with communist activists within it. The NNC went into eclipse, while Randolph's stature continued to grow.

In 1941 he used the threat of a march on Washington and support from the NAACP, Fiorello La Guardia and Eleanor Roosevelt to force the administration to ban discrimination by defense contractors and establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce that order. Milton Webster, the BSCP's First Vice-president, worked to make the FEPC an effective tool in combatting employment discrimination.

Merger with BRAC

Passenger rail travel dropped sharply after its peak in the 1940s, when the BSCP had 15,000 members, to the 1960s, when only 3000 porters had regular runs. After four decades of service as the first vice president of the BSCP, Milton Webster was designated to be Randolph's successor as president when Randolph retired. That transition never occurred. In February 1965, Webster suffered a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida while he and Randolph were attending an AFL-CIO Convention. C. L. Dellums replaced Randolph as president of the BSCP in 1968.

The BSCP merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC) a decade later. Dellums' successor and last president of the BSCP as an independent organization, Leroy J. Shackelford, became president of BRAC's Sleeping Car Porters Division. In 1984, the Sleeping Car Porters Division was combined, along with Amtrak clerical employees, into a new Amtrak Division of the union having approximately 5000 members, 3500 clerical and 1500 in on-board services, comprising the largest single unit of organized labor on the Amtrak system.

Upon Mr. Shackelford's retirement in 1985, his position was not filled, its duties devolving upon the general chairman of the BRAC Amtrak Division, Michael J. Young, and his successors. Thus ended the direct lineage of BSCP leadership, with Young becoming the first non-African American to lead the on-board group.

The three unions representing Amtrak on-board service workers, BRAC, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) joined to form the Amtrak Service Workers Council (ASWC). Craft lines and separate seniority lists for on-board workers were eliminated, with one labor agreement covering all. The chairmanship of the ASWC rotates annually among the chief executive officers of each constituent union's Amtrak bargaining unit.

Stage and film

In 1982 an award-winning documentary was produced titled Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle. An oral history book of the same name inspired by and based on the film was produced several years later.

The story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was made into the 2002 Robert Townsend film 10,000 Black Men Named George starring Andre Braugher as A. Philip Randolph.

The play Pullman Porter Blues (2012) by Cheryl West dramatizes a night aboard the Panama Limited train and the challenges and tensions among three generations of Pullman Porters.

The Porter (2022) is an 8-part CBC and BET television drama. It is a work of fiction partly inspired by the creation of the BSCP.

Notable Pullman porters

  • Frank L. Boyd
  • Big Bill Broonzy
  • Matthew Henson
  • Claude McKay
  • Benjamin Mays
  • Oscar Micheaux
  • Mozart Mimms
  • E. D. Nixon
  • Gordon Parks
  • Simon Haley
  • Cecil Newman
  • Milton Webster

Footnotes

Further reading

  • Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973.
  • Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
  • William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–37. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
  • Lyn Hughes, An Anthology of Respect:The Pullman Porters National Historic Registry of African American Railroad Employees Chicago: Hughes Peterson Publishing, 2007.
  • Paula F.A. Pfeffer, Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
  • Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
  • Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. New York: Macmillan, 2005.

See also

  • A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum
  • Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Headquarters Site, Oakland, Alameda County from Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California
  • Dunbar Apartments from We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
  • C. L. Dellums. International President of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and civil rights leader. oral history transcript / and related material, 1970–1973
  • Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Records at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University
  • Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Oral History Collection, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University