A UNION THAT MADE BLACK HISTORY

A UNION THAT MADE BLACK HISTORY
By Dick Meister

Few of the groups that we should honor during Black History Month are more
deserving than the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a pioneering union
that played a key role in the winning of equal rights by African Americans.

The union, the first to be founded by African Americans, was involved as
much in political as in economic activity, joining with the NAACP to serve
as the major political vehicle of African Americans from the late 1930s
through the 1950s. It led the drives in those years against racial
discrimination in employment, housing, education and other areas that laid
the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The need for a porters’ union was distressingly obvious. Porters commonly
worked 12 or more hours a day, six or even seven days a week, on the Pullman
Company’s luxurious sleeping car coaches for a mere $72.50 a month. And out
of that, they had to pay for their meals, uniforms, even the polish they
used to shine passengers’ shoes.

They got no fringe benefits, although they could ride the trains for
half-fare on their days off – providing they were among the very few with
the time and money to do so. And providing they didn’t ride a Pullman coach.

Pay was so low porters often had to draw on the equally meager earnings of
their wives, almost invariably employed as domestics, to pay the rent at
month’s end.

It was a marginal and humiliating experience. Porters were rightly proud of
their work, a pride that showed in their smiling, dignified bearing. But
they knew that no matter how well they performed, they would never be
promoted. They could never be conductors. Those jobs were reserved for white
men.

Porters knew most of all that their white passengers and white employers
controlled everything. It was they alone who decided what the porters must
do and what they’d get for doing it.

No point in arguing. No point in even correcting the many passengers who
called all porters “George” -- as in George Pullman, their boss -- whatever
their actual names, just as slaves had been called by their masters’ given
names.

When a passenger pulled the bell cord, porters were to answer swiftly and
cheerfully. Just do what the passengers asked – or demanded. Shine their
shoes, fetch them drinks, make their beds, empty their cuspidors. No
questions, no complaints, no protests. No rights. Nothing better epitomized
the huge distance between black and white in American society.

Hundreds of porters who challenged the status quo by daring to engage in
union activity or other concerted action were fired. But finally, the
administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted workers, black and
white, the legal right to unionize, and finally, in 1937, the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters won a union contract from Pullman.

The contract was signed precisely 12 years after union founder and president
A. Philip Randolph had called the union’s first organizing meeting in New
York City. But the long struggle was well worth it. The contract pulled the
porters out of poverty. It brought them pay at least equal to that of
unionized workers in many other fields, a standard work week, full range of
fringe benefits and, most important, the right to continue to bargain
collectively with Pullman on those and other vital matters.

Union President Randolph and Vice President C.L. Dellums, who succeeded him
in 1968, led the drive that pressured President Roosevelt into creating a
Fair Employment Practices Commission aimed at combating discrimination in
housing as well as employment. FDR agreed to set up the commission -- a
model for several state commissions – only after Randolph and Dellums
threatened to lead a march on Washington by more than 100,000 black workers
and others who were demanding federal action against discrimination.

Dellums and Randolph struggled as hard against discrimination inside the
labor movement, particularly against the practice of unions setting up
segregated locals, one for white members, one for black members.

Randolph, elected in 1957 as the AFL-CIO’s first black vice president, long
was known as the civil rights conscience of the labor movement, often
prodding federation President George Meany and other conservative AFL-CIO
leaders to take stands against racial discrimination.

The sleeping car coaches that once were the height of travel luxury have
long since disappeared, and there are very few sleeping car porters in this
era of less-than-luxurious train travel.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car porters is gone, too. But before the union
disappeared, it had reached goals as important as any ever sought by an
American union – or any other organization.

Copyright © 2008 Dick Meister

Story ID:	3460
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Location:	everywhere USA
Year:	1937