The 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. What started as a campaign for more money and better treatment became an important force for social change.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly fry So Holly. When you
took uh like U S history classes that talked about

(00:21):
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 entigrity
of the focus, so like being barred from the schools,
in the restrooms and other whites only places, being kept
from voting, being denied legal protections that white people really

(00:44):
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
that equation, which is the things that only Africa and
Americans were allowed to do. There were jobs that used
an entirely black workforce as a way to subjugate people

(01:07):
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 of a class well, and even having having
taken uh in an entire class on social movements, a
third of which was devoted to the civil rights movement

(01:29):
in college. I don't think that's something that we really
got into UM. But today we're going to talk about
one of these jobs, which was the sleeping car porter.
In the nineteen twenties, sleeping 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

(01:50):
first African American labor union to be recognized by the
American Federation of the Labor. While the union started out
campaigning for more money and better treatment for its members,
it became an important force for social change during the
American Civil Rights movement. But before we talk about the
porters and their unions specifically, we need to just talk

(02:10):
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 Pullman put his stamp
on the sleeping car, the trip wasn't really comfortable, particularly

(02:31):
if you had to travel overnight. Uh that's actually still
true today. Yes, I've made multiple trips by train from
Atlanta to Washington, d C. That we're all overnight and
it's not comfortable. I had a sleeping car one time,
and that was marginally more comfortable, but still not the

(02:53):
like total luxury experience that it became uh in in
the nineteenth cent 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
from seats and folded down from the walls. But what
really set Pullman cars apart from the other sleeper cars

(03:17):
on the market was their staff of porters, the first
of whom was hired in eighteen sixty seven. Railroad lines
who wanted to have Pullman cars as part of their
trains leased them from the Pulling Company, and a staff
of maids and porters came along as part of the package.
And the porter's work was really what made the Pullman
cars a true luxury experience. They had an exceptional reputation

(03:41):
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 travelers coats, they
would polish shoes, They served meals and beverages, and basically
attended to every need a passenger might have throughout their journey,
including looking after and clear eating up after sick passengers

(04:01):
like 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 a hundred years,
they were also exclusively African American. Many of the earliest
Pullman porters were recently freed slaves, and as the years
wore on, the Pullman Company made a concerted effort of

(04:23):
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 motives were not philanthropic, and he
did not try to disguise that fact. He chose African

(04:45):
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
we're grueling hours. He expected newly freed slaves to be
used to being subservient to white people, and the white
passengers were also accustomed to having African Americans around as
a servant class. Uh So, African Americans, for context, could

(05:09):
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 uh white customer base. By the nineteen twenties,
more than twenty thousand African American men were employed as

(05:30):
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.
Um There was about one made for every fifty porters
in the mid nineteen twenties, and the job of a
pullman porter was actually a highly coveted one, and porters

(05:53):
were very well respected within their home communities. The job
did not require a lot of heavy manually, 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,
and they also, as a consequence, wound up being the
company's best recruiters because they would return home with stories

(06:16):
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
work four hundred hours or travel eleven thousand miles in

(06:38):
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
was about eight hundred and seventeen dollars a year, and

(06:59):
then in twenties. UM, I look 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. Yeah. So if if you really really want
a number, we can call it about twenty two dollars
for thirty or thirty one, thirteen or fourteen hour days minimum.

(07:22):
And I was winding earlier about how angry I get
just harming 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,
but it was much much less than white people could
make in other pullman company jobs. For example, porters made

(07:44):
much less than the conductors, who were all white, yet
they often had to do the work of the conductor.
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
columns or towels or other small items, as often happens

(08:09):
in any kind of situation like that, it was stocked
from the porter's pay. And then there were uh parts
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

(08:31):
and the passengers blankets were sort of salmon color. When
the passenger blankets started to wear out and become 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

(08:51):
thirty nights when they didn't sleep at all. We're using
the thirteen to fourteen hour a day number is an average.
In reality, their word days off and they be working
more like twenty one hours in a day for most
of their working time. Um, 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

(09:12):
the smoking car behind a screen, and they were not
allowed to clear the car so that they could sleep.
Porters were also required to answer to the name of
George uh. This was a holdover from 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. Uh, you probably guess what it is. And

(09:35):
it was pretty much a given that calling a porter
George meant 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

(09:55):
of these issues at the company faced retaliation in the
form of being randed troublemakers or even just fired. So
the porters, uh, you know, recognizing that there were conditions
about their work that they would like a change, tried
to unionize three times between nineteen o nine and nineteen thirteen.
None of these was successful, but the company realized that

(10:16):
had a problem, so it started its own union, the
Pullman Porter's Benefit Association, in nineteen fifteen. It's 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

(10:40):
to fund this plan out of the porter's salaries, so
it had basically the company recognized its labor issue quote
and then tried to address it by making this kind
of company run union. And this wasn't the only time
that the Pullman Company had really taken the bull by

(11:01):
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, 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

(11:23):
you can only get alcohol there if you were a
guest and not a resident of the town. So when
a depression started in eighteen ninety 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

(11:45):
he died in eighteen ninety seven, he left instructions that
he be entombed in steel and concrete so that disgremal
employees could not desecrate his body. Yeah, that's that's an
adversarial relationship, quite adversiveate extremely mildly well, and the town
of Pullman is a fascinating story on its own. It

(12:06):
had kind of a extremely weird Stepford quality about it.
The company would come and search people's homes just because,
like it was really a surveillance state for the people
who were living there. Um. So back to the porters. Finally,
in n a New York porter named Ashley L. Totton
got four other porters together in secret, and together they

(12:28):
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 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

(12:51):
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. Right at this point,
he had a long history 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

(13:11):
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.
Now on to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It
had its first meeting on August and it published a
list of demands in The Messenger, which was a magazine

(13:33):
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 increasing the pensions.
And the porters also demanded that a name card be
placed in each car so that passengers could call could

(13:53):
call them their actual names instead of George. And it
may seem kind of odd that they would want to
abolished tipping, since that was a source of income, but
because porter's base pay was so low, they had to
be completely subservient and ingretiating 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,

(14:16):
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 the union as a
legitimate organization that it would notice that would negotiate with.
It started firing people who were working with the union
and infiltrating union meetings with spies. And because of all

(14:36):
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 also instrumental in
maintaining secrecy. Uh 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 for

(15:00):
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, and without the
Ladies Auxiliary, the Brotherhood probably would have failed. Espionage was
also only one way that the company tried to outmaneuver
the union. The Pullman Company started by negotiating pay raises

(15:22):
with the in house unions try to make it look good.
These were much much smaller raises than what the Union
or the you know, the Brotherhood was campaigning 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

(15:43):
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 of the
porters were in favor of the in House Union and
not the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Borders 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

(16:05):
union supporters as communists, and the union branding porters who
wouldn't join as traders to their race. The company intimidated
people who talked about joining and the union and intimidated
people who didn't join. It was kind of an ugly
fight on both sides and a lot of ways. And
then in the late nineteen twenties, the union nearly collapsed

(16:27):
following a call for a strike that never got off
the ground. The Brotherhood's membership started to drop because people started,
we're starting to feel really frustrated about the fact that
nothing was actually changing. Membership was halved between nine and
nineteen 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,

(16:50):
so by nineteen thirty three it only had six hundred
and fifty eight members. But in nineteen thirty four, President
Franklin 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 the Pullman Company finally sat down with

(17:13):
Randolph and other members of the union to negotiate for
the first time. Two years later, the Pullman Company finally
recognized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porders. The Brotherhood signed
its first labor agreement with the company on August of
that year. This agreement raised the minimum salary from seventy
seven dollars and fifty cents to eighty nine dollars and

(17:35):
fifty cents a month. That might not sound like the
most monumental pay increase, but it was 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,

(17:55):
the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters continued to negotiate with
the Pullman Company. The monthly pay, when 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

(18:17):
helping other labor organizations integrate the jobs that had previously
been acceptable only for white people. 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. These were

(18:40):
basically white people named George who objected two the associations
with their name that were happening. Yeah, 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. There was

(19:00):
probably one that they did not want to be associated
with people, But they did eventually 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 antitrust complaint against the company. In the end,

(19:24):
the company was ordered to divest itself of either its
business of operating sleeper cars or its business of building
sleeper cars. If this sort of rings a bell in
your mind, it was cited as a precedent in the
Microsoft antitrust case. This case continued to shake out through
the nineteen forties, and in ninety seven Pullman formally handed
over ownership of the sleeping car business to a consortium

(19:47):
of fifty seven railroads. The Brotherhood continued to negotiate with
the railroads, and by this point it was no longer
an exclusively African American organization. It also represented white barbers,
maids from the Philippe Means, 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

(20:08):
become a force for equal rights outside of their working life.
So in the 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

(20:28):
a federal hiring system that favored white people. Randolph and
other black leaders actually met with Eleanor Roosevelt and members
of the cabinet promising a protest march on Washington. On
June twenty ninety 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

(20:51):
be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
After World War Two, Randolph was also part of the
effort to integrate the American Army, and thanks in part
to his campaigning but also to the realities of needing
the black vote to win re election, President Harry S.

(21:12):
Truman banned segregation of the armed forces through Executive Order
one on July. Randolph was also a director of the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Dr
Martin Luther King Jr. Gave his famous I Have a
Dream speech. D. D. Nixon, whose name you may remember
from our recent episode on Rosa Parks, worked on the

(21:35):
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 Montgomery Improvement Association, which was
the position that was held by Dr Martin Luther King
because of his work schedule. Like Edie Nixon, other Pullman
porters became civil rights activists in their own hometowns. The

(21:56):
Brotherhood and its members had gone up against white white
power structure and eventually one Because of the nature of
their jobs, the porters were also acutely aware of the
effects of racism and discrimination. 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

(22:16):
and literature bypassing the mail system, So if you had
places where corrupt mail officials were just trashing things instead
of delivering them. They had a way to work around
that by using this network of sleeping car porders. The
railroad really dropped off as a means of travel in
the nineteen sixties thanks to the rise of air travel

(22:38):
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. 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

(22:58):
labor and civil rights champion is that they had been
for so many years, and instead they remembered the part
where African American porters cow town to white passengers for tips.
I think that's one of the saddest things about this
whole story. It really is um you have a group
of people who worked so hard for so long to

(23:18):
take and take ownership of their jobs and 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 it's
offensive really and completely mischaracterized. Yeah. Yeah, the Brotherhood of
Sleeping car Porters merged with the Brotherhood of Railway airline,

(23:39):
steamship clerks, freight handlers, express and station employees in UH.
That is a very long name for basically what was
a similar organization of service positions in travel. Um. And
this was just because at that point there weren't really
sleeping cars in that way anymore. And as for a
Philip Randolph, he was awarded the Press Cudential Medal of

(24:00):
Freedom in nineteen sixty four. He died on May sixteenth
of nineteen seventy nine. UM. There 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 of
the whole like the job of sleeping car porter and

(24:22):
the the work of the union and 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.
And about what their lives were like and about what

(24:43):
the time was like. And so there are just so
many first person accounts in this book. Um, if you
were interested in it at all, Um, you you should.
You should check it out and and take a look
at it. It is a very interesting story with many
things that we have not talked about here. Um. There's
also a book called Marching Together, Women of the Brotherhood

(25:04):
of Sleeping car Porters, which is something that we only
touched on a little bit today. Um. The Sleeping car
Porters are 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 of thing. Do you also

(25:24):
have a listener mail for us? Why? Yes, I do.
This is from John and it is about our episode
on the Pueblo Revolt. Hey guys, I really appreciated your
Pueblo Revolt podcast and was happy to hear you guys
talk about my home state of New Mexico, the Land
of Enchantment. I thought you might be interested to hear
some additional info I learned on a recent visit to
the Akama Pueblo near Grants, New Mexico. While on tour

(25:46):
through the Peblo, which is still alive and inhabited with residents,
we went into the Spaniard church, which was built in
sixteen twenty nine atop the mesa with the rest of
the Pueblo structures. What I was surprised to learn while
inside the stripped own church was how the Spaniards used
brute force to make the Akama people construct the church
with supplies gathered around the mesa. Some of the main

(26:08):
structural pieces were very large vegas to wooden support tresses,
which were gathered from atop the nearby Mount Taylor more
than thirty miles away. These huge timbers were specially selected
by the Spaniards and were carried on the backs of
the Pueblo people all the way back to the church site.
It was mentioned that because of the religious significance of
these specially selected timbers, the Akama people carrying the trees

(26:33):
were not allowed to let the timber touch the ground
on the way back, otherwise they would be forced to
drop the vega and head back to the mountain to
find a new one to replace it. I can only
imagine the difficulty in that task, especially after seeing l
mal Pay the bad Land, which is a large expanse
of lava flows between the Sky City Akama Pueblo and

(26:53):
Mount Taylor, which the Akama must have had to deal
with with crossing while carrying the timbers for the Spaniards.
I hope this helped to give you guys a more
in depth look at the pressures the Pueblo people were
faced with, and I look forward to many more of
your podcast. That is a kind of heartbreaking story, it is.
It was also a chance for me to correctly pronounce

(27:15):
the word Acama, which I said completely wrong in the
episode because the pronunciation looked so obvious to me that
I did not look it up. It happened. Um. I
also mispronounced one day one and that was just because
I badly tried to speak Spanish did not do a
good job with it. So thank you so much, John.

(27:37):
If you would like to write to us about this
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(27:58):
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like to learn more about some of what we've talked
about today, you can come to our website. Put the
word March on Washington, which a Philip Randolph helped to coordinate.
Put that in the search bar and you will find
how the March on Washington worked. You can learn all
of that and a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com. Mm hmmm mm

(30:35):
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