SYMHC Classics: Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first African-American labor union to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor. This 2014 episode covers how the group became an important force for social change.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up soon on the show, we're going
to have an episode on labor organizer and civil rights
activist A. Philip Randolph. One part of his work that
gets the most attention is his effort to organize the
Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters. In this upcoming episode, we're
going to cover him in a lot more depth than

(00:23):
Nuance and just that one bit. We covered the Brotherhood
of Sleeping car Porters in our February twenty six, twenty
fourteen episode, and we're bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic.
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:52):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Prie. So, Holly, Yeah,
when you took like US history classes that talked about
the Civil rights movement, do you feel like a lot
of the focus was on the things that African Americans
were not allowed to do? So like almost the integrity
of the focus. Yeah, So, like being barred from the

(01:13):
schools and the restrooms and other whites only places, being
kept from voting, being denied legal protections that white people
really took for granted, Like all of that kind of
stuff feels like a big part of the context for
the civil rights movement in history classes in the United States,
for sure. So there's actually a whole other part of

(01:34):
that equation, which is the things that only African Americans
were allowed to do. There were jobs that used an
entirely black workforce as a way to subjugate people and
maintain a racial status quo. I only became aware that
this was a thing like as an adult. Yeah, me too.
I definitely do not recall ever having that as part

(01:56):
of a class well, and even having taken in an
entire class on social movements a third of which was
devoted to the civil rights movement in college. I don't
think that's something that we really got into. But today
we're going to talk about one of these jobs, which
was the sleeping car porter. In the nineteen twenties, sleeping

(02:18):
car porters unionized and they successfully fought for better pay
and working conditions. Their union, which was the Brotherhood of
Sleeping car Porters, became the first African American labor union
to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor. While
the union started out campaigning for more money and better
treatment for its members. It became an important force for

(02:40):
social change during the American Civil Rights movement. But before
we talk about the porters and their union specifically, we
need to just talk a little bit about trains because
it's important to contextualize where all this was going on. So,
by the end of the nineteenth century, the railroad was
basically the easiest and fastest way to travel long distances
in the United States, But until an industrialist named George

(03:04):
Pullman put his stamp on the sleeping car, the trip
wasn't really comfortable, particularly if you had to travel overnight.
That's actually still true today. Yes, I've made multiple trips
by train from Atlanta to Washington, DC that were all
overnight and it's not comfortable. I had a sleeping car

(03:28):
one time, and that was marginally more comfortable, but still
not the like total luxury experience that it became in
the nineteenth century. So the Pullman Company put out its
first sleeper car in eighteen sixty five. These cars featured
really beautiful and comfortable furnishings. There were berths that converted

(03:48):
from seats and folded down from the walls. But what
really set Pullman cars apart from the other sleeper cars
on the market was their staff of porters, the first
of whom was hired in eighteen sixty s railroad lines
who wanted to have Pullman cars as part of their
trains leased them from the Pullman Company, and a staff
of maids and porters came along as part of the package.

(04:11):
And the porter's work was really what made the Pullman
cars a true luxury experience. They had an exceptional reputation
for quality and service. The porters would make down the
beds at night and they would make them back up
again in the morning. They would brush traveler's coats, they
would polish shoes. They served meals and beverages, and basically

(04:32):
attended to every need a passenger might have throughout their journey,
looking after and cleaning up after sick passengers. They took
care of people in every possible way, and porters were
even responsible for the safety and security of passengers, including children.
And for almost one hundred years, they were also exclusively
African American. Many of the earliest Pullman porters were recently

(04:56):
freed slaves, and as the years wore on, the Pullman
Company made up concerted effort of hiring most of its
porters out of the Deep South. Once hired, the workers
mostly worked out of northern railroad hub cities, especially Chicago,
and George Pullman got a great deal of praise at
the time for employing so many black workers, but his

(05:17):
motives were not philanthropic, and he did not try to
disguise that fact. He chose African American labor for his
sleeping cars because he knew he would get a workforce
that was grateful to have a job and would be
willing to accept low pay and work grueling hours. He
expected newly freed slaves to be used to being subservient
to white people, and the white passengers were also accustomed

(05:40):
to having African Americans around as a servant class. So
African Americans, for context, could ride these trains, but they
had to ride in segregated cars, and they certainly were
not allowed to ride in sleeper cars. Yes, so it
was basically an exclusively black workforce waiting on a almost
exclusively white customer base. By the nineteen twenties, more than

(06:05):
twenty thousand African American men were employed as Pullman porters
and other train personnel. The Pullman Company became the largest
employer of African American men and the United States. There
were also African American maids who worked on the trains.
There was about one made for every fifty porters in
the mid nineteen twenties, and the job of a pullman

(06:28):
porter was actually a highly coveted one, and porters were
very well respected within their home communities. The job did
not require a lot of heavy manual labor, which was
rare among jobs for African American men, and porters got
to travel all over and so they became sources of
information about jobs and news when they would travel back home,

(06:48):
and they also, as a consequence, wound up being the
company's best recruiters because they would return home with stories
of adventure and travel, and they would have pockets full
of tips. So it looked like a very glamorous, uh
you know, really pretty cushy job to a lot of people, yes,
but in reality, porters worked extremely long hours for not
much money. A pullman porter in the twenties had to

(07:12):
work four hundred hours or travel eleven thousand miles in
a month, whichever came first, to earn his full pay.
So if you're doing math in your head right now,
that is thirteen to fourteen hours a day every day
with zero days off during the month, or about two
round trips all the way across the country from New
York to San Francisco. The base salary for this work

(07:34):
was about eight hundred and seventeen dollars a year in
the nineteen twenties. I looked at a bunch of different
ways to calculate how much this means today, and they
are widely Yeah, it's hard to do the transliteration on
yeah time. Yeah. So if you really really want a number,
we can call it about twenty two thousand dollars for

(07:54):
thirty or thirty one, thirteen or fourteen hour days minimum.
And I was whining earlier about how angry I get
just having to get up in the morning. Most porters
actually made more in tips than they did in salary,
and added together this These two incomes often made up
for more money than many other jobs open to African Americans,

(08:16):
but it was much much less than white people could
make in other pulling company jobs. For example, porters made
much less than the conductors, who were all white, yet
they often had to do the work of the conductor.

(08:37):
Porters also had to spend a lot of their pay
on things that they needed for work, including food, uniforms,
and shoe polish. They also had to pay for their
own lodging during layovers, and if passengers walked off with
colmbs or towels or other small items, as often happens
in any kind of situation like that, it was stocked
from the porter's pay. And then there they were parts

(09:01):
of the job that were really quite frankly degrading. For example,
the porter's blankets were never allowed to be mixed with
the passengers blankets in the wash, and to achieve this,
they were color coded, so the porter's blankets were blue
and the passengers blankets were a sort of salmon color.
When the passenger blankets started to wear out and become

(09:22):
unfit for use, they would be dyed blue, and then
those worn out blankets would be given to the porters.
The porters didn't get to use these blankets much though
most of them got to sleep a maximum of three
hours a night, and that really was a maximum they were.
There'd be nights when they didn't sleep at all. We're
using this thirteen to fourteen hour a day numbers an average.

(09:43):
In reality, there were days off and they would be
working more like twenty one hours in a day for
most of their working time, so they did not get
a lot of sleep. They also had no berths assigned
to them. Porters usually had to sleep on couches in
the smoking car behind a screen, and they were not
allowed to clear the car so that they could sleep.

(10:04):
Porters were also required to answer to the name of George.
This was a holdover for when slaves were referred to
by their master's names, and just as often they were
called not by a name at all, but by a
racial slur that we are not interested in repeating here.
You could probably guess what it is, and it was
pretty much a given that calling a porter George meant

(10:24):
the same thing as using that slur. Because of segregation,
it was also entirely possible for porters to have no
safe place to sleep and nowhere to get food during layovers,
and the company really didn't do anything to compensate for that.
Porters who tried to address any of these issues at
the company faced retaliation in the form of being branded

(10:46):
troublemakers or even just fired. So the porters, you know,
recognizing that there were conditions about their work that they
would like to change, tried to unionize three times between
nineteen oh nine and nineteen thirteen. One of these was successful,
but the company realized that had a problem, so it
started its own union, the Pullman Porter's Benefit Association, in

(11:08):
nineteen fifteen. Its first chairman, Arthur A. Wells, was actually
George Pullman's personal assistant and his attendant in his private car.
The company also established the Employee Representation Plan in nineteen twenty,
which was purportedly to focus on getting better pay. It
docked the money to fund this plan out of the
porter's salaries, so it had basically the company recognized its

(11:33):
labor issue quote and then tried to address it by
making this kind of company run union. Yeah, and this
wasn't the only time that the Pullman Company had really
taken the bull by the horns to try to solve
labor problems. In eighteen eighty, the Pullman Company built the
town of Pullman, which was south of Chicago, as worker housing,

(11:56):
and from the outside it really looked like a wholesome
place to live, but the company controlled everything about it,
down to what books the library could have. It was
a dry town and the only place that served alcohol
was a hotel, but you could only get alcohol there
if you were a guest and not a resident of
the town. So when a depression started in eighteen ninety

(12:17):
four and residents couldn't afford to live on what was
left after the company payroll deducted their rent, it contributed
to a strike that was so bad the federal government
had to intervene. George Pullman's relationship with his employees was
contentious enough that when he died in eighteen ninety seven,
he left instructions that he'd be entombed in steel and
concrete so that disgruntled employees could not desecrate his body. Yeah,

(12:41):
that's that's an adversarial relationship. Quite adversary, but extremely mildly well.
And the town of Pullman is a fascinating story on
its own. It had kind of an extremely weird Stepford
quality about it. The company would come and search people's
homes just because because it was really a surveillance state

(13:02):
for the people who were living there. So back to
the porters. Finally, in nineteen twenty five, a New York
porter named Ashley L. Totten got four other porters together
in secret, and together they approached a man named a
Philip Randolph to help them start a union and to
lead it once it was off the ground. A. Philip
Randolph had never worked for the Pullman Company, he'd never

(13:25):
even ridden in one of its cars, but he did
have a long history and a notorious reputation for labor activism.
He was also a pacifist, he was an atheist, and
he was a socialist. So in short, that meant that
he basically had enemies everywhere. But he was an excellent
advocate and he was really devoted to the cause of
labor rights at this point. He had a long history

(13:48):
of political activity, including a very long effort to encourage
African Americans to unionize and to advocate for themselves in
labor issues. So after some initial reluctance, he decided to
help start a union. And before we talk about the union,
would you like to take a moment and talk about
a word from our sponsor that sounds spectacular. Now on

(14:16):
to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It had its
first meeting on August twenty fifth, nineteen twenty five, and
it published a list of demands in The Messenger, which
was a magazine that A. Philip Randolph had co founded
in nineteen seventeen. Among These demands were a significant pay raise,
abolishing the practice of tipping, providing adequate rest breaks, and

(14:39):
increasing the pensions. And the porters also demanded that a
name card be placed in each car so that passengers
could call them their actual names instead of George. And
it may seem kind of odd that they would want
to abolish tipping since that was a source of income,
but because porter's base pay was so low, they had

(14:59):
to be comple completely subservient and ingratiating to white writers
at all times in the hope of getting a better
tips that they were making a living wage, so abolishing
tips could lessen, but not entirely remove, one of the
most degrading aspects of their job. The Pullman Company met
zero of these demands, and it also did not recognize

(15:19):
the union as a legitimate organization that it not that
would negotiate with. It started firing people who were working
with the union and infiltrating union meetings with spies. And
because of all the espionage that was going on on
the company's part, the brotherhood became extremely secretive. There were
secret passwords, there were secret handshakes. The porter's wives were

(15:40):
also instrumental in maintaining secrecy. They formed an ancillary network
to distribute information and even attend on their husband's behalf
if spies were said to be present. The porter's wives
eventually formed what was called the Ladies Auxiliary, which campaigned,
they held fundraisers. They helped keep the union members morale
up during the really long effort to get official recognition,

(16:03):
and without the Ladies Auxiliary, the Brotherhood probably would have failed.
Espionage was also only one way that the company tried
to out maneuver the union. The Pullman Company started by
negotiating pay raises with the in house unions try to
make it look good. These were much much smaller raises
than what the union or you know, the Brotherhood was

(16:24):
came paigning for. It also started strategically hiring people it
thought would be more compliant, and it also did its
share of media spin about how well paid and well
treated its employees were, including publishing articles to that effect
in the Black Papers. It also cooked its numbers with
its own polls that it conducted to make it look
like eighty five percent of the porters were in favor

(16:47):
of the in house union and not the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters. And the Brotherhood's effort to be recognized
went on for twelve extremely difficult years. There was name
calling on both sides. The company branded unions of porters
as communists and the union branding porters who wouldn't join
as traders to their race. The company intimidated people who

(17:08):
talked about joining, and the union intimidated people who didn't join. Yeah,
it was kind of an ugly fight on both sides
in a lot of ways. And then in the late
nineteen twenties, the union nearly collapsed following a call for
a strike that never got off the ground. The Brotherhood's
membership started to drop because people were starting to feel
really frustrated about the fact that nothing was actually changing.

(17:30):
Membership was had between nineteen twenty eight and nineteen twenty nine,
and then again by nineteen thirty one. Then, thanks to
the Great Depression, the threat of job loss made people
even more reluctant to be involved in the union, so
by nineteen thirty three it only had six hundred and
fifty eight members. But in nineteen thirty four, President Franklin

(17:51):
Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged
collective bargaining and gave the union a legal footing that
it had not had before, and membership started to grow again.
In nineteen thirty five, the Pullman Company finally sat down
with Randolph and other members of the union to negotiate
for the first time. Two years later, the Pullman Company

(18:13):
finally recognized the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters. The Brotherhood
signed its first labor agreement with the company on August
twenty fifth of that year. This agreement raised the minimum
salary from seventy seven dollars and fifty cents to eighty
nine dollars and fifty cents a month. That might not
sound like the most monumental pay increase, but it was

(18:34):
for two hundred and forty hours of work, not four hundred.
The agreement also guaranteed sleeping time, it established a procedure
for handling grievances, and gave some other benefits as well.
Over the years, the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters continued
to negotiate with the Pullman Company. The monthly pay, when

(18:54):
averaged out to an hourly rate, was eventually better than
that of engineers, conductors, and other railroad positions that were
at that point held by white people. Working conditions improved
as well. Gradually, the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters also
turned its attention to helping other labor organizations integrate the
jobs that had previously been acceptable only for white people.

(19:18):
As a side note, it was apparently an all white
organization of guys named George called the Society for the
Prevention of Calling Sleeping car Porters George that convinced the
Pullman Company to put name cards for the porters in
the cars. Yeah. These were basically white people named George
who objected to the associations with their name that were happening. Yeah. Yeah,

(19:41):
It's kind of like if the name Tracy had become
some sort of racial slur and you and all the
other Tracy said that's not cool. I think my motivation
would be a little different than than the organization's motivation was. Yeah,
this was probably one that they did not want to
be associated right with black people. But they did eventuallyually

(20:02):
move away from the practice of just calling everyone George.
So the Pullman Company made a practice of buying up
a lot of its competitors, and in nineteen forty the
United States Department of Justice filed an anti trust complaint
against the company. In the end, the company was ordered
to divest itself of either its business of operating sleeper
cars or its business of building sleeper cars. If this

(20:26):
sort of rings a bell in your mind, it was
cited as a precedent in the Microsoft anti trust case.
This case continued to shake out through the nineteen forties,
and in nineteen forty seven, Pullman formally handed over ownership
of the sleeping car business to a consortium of fifty
seven railroads. The Brotherhood continued to negotiate with the railroads,

(20:46):
and by this point it was no longer an exclusively
African American organization. It also represented white barbers, maids from
the Philippines and others working in service positions on the railroads.
At about this same time, the Brotherhood and its leadership
and its members also started to become a force for
equal rights outside of their working life. So in the

(21:06):
nineteen forties, many African Americans moved to urban areas where
defense work was in full swing because there was a
huge demand for workers as part of the war effort.
The problem was once they got there, African Americans often
faced harassment and discrimination, and there was a federal hiring
system that favored white people. Randolph and other black leaders

(21:28):
actually met with Eleanor Roosevelt and members of the cabinet
promising a protest march on Washington. On June twenty fifth
of nineteen forty one, FDR issued Executive Order eight eight
zero two, which said, in part quote, I do hereby
reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall
be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.

(21:52):
After World War Two, Randolph was also part of the
effort to integrate the American army, and thanks in part
to his campig but also to the realities of needing
the black vote to win reelection, President Harry S. Truman
banned segregation of the armed forces through Executive Order nine
nine eight one on July twenty sixth, nineteen forty eight.

(22:14):
Randolph was also a director of the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, at which doctor Martin Luther King
Junior gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. Ed Nixon,
whose name you may remember from our recent episode on
Rosa Parks, worked on the Montgomery bus boycott. He was
also a sleeping car porter, and in fact he took
himself out of the running to be president of the

(22:36):
Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the position that was held
by doctor Martin Luther King because of his work schedule.
Like Ed Nixon, other Pulman porters became civil rights activists
in their own hometowns. The Brotherhood and its members had
gone up against white power structure and eventually won. Because
of the nature of their jobs, the porters were also

(22:57):
acutely aware of the effects of racism and discriminate. The
porters used all this experience to become important sources of
information and organization throughout the civil rights movement. They also
smuggled and distributed pamphlets and literature bypassing the mail system. Yeah,
so if you had places where corrupt mail officials were
just trashing things instead of delivering them, they had a

(23:20):
way to work around that by using this network of
sleeping car porters. The railroad really dropped off as a
means of travel in the nineteen sixties thanks to the
rise of air travel and the interstate highway system. The
number of pullman porters working really just dropped precipitously. There
were only about three thousand of them by nineteen sixty two,

(23:43):
and after the Civil rights movement, and in spite of
the involvement and leadership on the part of so many members,
a lot of people really stopped seeing the Pullman porters
as the labor and civil rights champions that they had
been for so many years, and instead they remembered the
part where African American porters kowtowed white passengers for tips. Yeah.
I think that's one of the saddest things about this

(24:04):
whole story. It really is. You have a group of
people who worked so hard for so long to take
ownership of their jobs and to gain a measure of
dignity in a job that was inherently demeaning in a
lot of ways. But today the takeaway to a lot
of people is this image that's offensive, really and completely mischaracterized. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

(24:28):
The Brotherhood of Sleeping car porters merged with the Brotherhood
of Railway airline steamship clerks, freight handlers, express and station
employees in nineteen seventy eight. That is a very long
name for basically what was a similar organization of service
positions in travel. And this was just because at that
point there weren't really sleeping cars in that way anymore.

(24:50):
And as for a Philip Randolph, he was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen sixty four. He died
on May sixteenth of nineteen seventy nine. Is a really
great book called Rising from the Rails Pullman Porters and
the Making of the Black Middle Class, which is by
Larry Tye and uh. One of the awesome things about it,
in addition to the fact that it gives a chronology

(25:12):
of the whole like the job of sleeping car porter
and the the work of the union and the progress
that was made over the years, is that the author
tracked down as many living pullman porters as he could
find or their families like immediate family members and children,
to talk to them about what the job was like,

(25:34):
and about what their lives were like, and about what
the time was like. And so there are just so
many first person accounts in this book. If you are
interested in it at all, you you should. You should
check it out and take a look at it. It
is a very interesting story with many things that we
have not talked about here. There's also a book called

(25:55):
Marching Together, Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters,
which is something that we only touched on a little
bit today. The Sleeping Car Porters at various points also
had and Maids in its name because there were also
maids working on the cars, but the porters definitely get
more attention in terms of historical accounts and that kind

(26:16):
of thing. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
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(26:37):
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(26:58):
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