Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945
By Beth Tompkins Bates
University of North Carolina Press, 304 pages, $45, $17.95 paper
When a group of black railway-sleeping-car porters asked A. Philip Randolph to lead their effort to unionize in 1925, it would have been understandable if the Harlem socialist had turned them down. Organized labor was everywhere in retreat during the 1920s. Moreover, the porters’ employer, Pullman Sleeping Car Co., seemed impervious to unionism. For decades the company had curried favor with the black communities from which it drew its porters. In Chicago, where the company had its headquarters, Pullman philanthropy underwrote black churches, hospitals and community centers. Nor were porters necessarily ripe for organization. Although they earned only one-half the wage of white conductors, porters made enough in tips to be considered labor aristocrats in their communities, their status enhanced by the romance of life on the rails. Would Pullman porters risk their coveted jobs to form a union?
Despite the obstacles, Randolph agreed to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). A dozen years later, thanks largely to Randolph’s vision, the union had not only wrested a contract from its employer, it had begun to transform black politics in America. As Beth Tompkins Bates suggests in her splendid study, “Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945,” to a remarkable extent Randolph and his allies made the emerging union into a potent instrument for the liberation of all of black America, an organization that paved the way for the modern civil rights movement.
Randolph could not have picked a better constituency around which to build a movement of such broad influence. Constantly traveling along the nation’s rail lines, porters constituted a living network that linked rural black America to Harlem, South Side Chicago and other black metropolises. The publishers of the Chicago Defender appreciated this fact. The Defender became the most popular African-American newspaper in the South because Pullman porters dropped its bundles in black establishments throughout the region. The advantages of organizing such a network for militant action on behalf of black civil rights were obvious to BSCP leaders from the start.
Organizing Pullman porters was also symbolically crucial, for the porter’s work inevitably recalled the humiliations of slavery. The company encouraged customers to call all porters “George”–after company founder George Pullman–a designation porters were expected to accept “as though it were a balm instead of an affront,” as one observer put it. Furthermore, because their hourly wages were so low, porters had no choice but to ingratiate themselves with their customers in order to garner generous tips. As one ex-porter remembered: ” ‘Pullman made hustlers out of us. They had us constantly on our knees.’ ” Replacing such servility with militant self-organization, union organizers believed, would strike at the heart of the racial paternalism that oppressed black America.
Bates’ contribution to our understanding of the significance of the porters’ movement is twofold. First, she documents better than any writer yet the degree to which the union’s ultimate success flowed from its patient coalition–building in black Chicago. At the same time, she shows how effective the union was in getting 1930s civil rights activists to adopt militant protest politics.
In her analysis of the Chicago union, Bates illuminates how it galvanized newer black activists to challenge the “politics of civility” pursued by such organizations as the NAACP and most black churches. Heavily dependent upon white philanthropists and led by cautious lobbyists, the NAACP avoided anything that smacked of radicalism before the BSCP entered the field. Chicago’s leading black churchmen, meanwhile, depended on patronage administered by such white power brokers as Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson. Working with newer activists such as journalist Ida B. Wells–Barnett and Rev. Junius C. Austin of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, the union simply out-organized the older activists.
The union sponsored annual conferences that brought together a wide spectrum of black America to discuss ways of joining workers’ struggles to a broader civil rights effort. And in 1936, the BSCP helped launch the National Negro Congress, which linked civil rights activism to the rising Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the end, such organizing pushed older groups like the NAACP toward a more militant posture.
The new militancy came to a head when World War II defense production revived the stagnant economy but blacks were systematically excluded from the new jobs. In response, the BSCP joined with the NAACP to create the March on Washington Movement, which threatened to bring 100,000 protesters to Washington if President Franklin Roosevelt did not enforce equal employment opportunity.
Initially, Roosevelt tried to have the march called off without making any promises. The story of the March on Washington Movement has been told before, but Bates sees this confrontation’s significance in a new light. Ultimately, she argues, Roosevelt gave in because NAACP President Walter White, who had come to embrace militancy under constant BSCP prodding, stuck by the movement and resisted Roosevelt’s appeals to withdraw the march threat. Only when Roosevelt agreed to issue Executive Order 8802, banning employment discrimination in defense plants, did the movement’s leadership cancel the march. That breakthrough inaugurated the civil rights era.
During World War II, the BSCP sponsored events that continuously linked the fight against Hitlerism to the fight against segregation. After the war, black Americans turned their full attention to the fight at home, practicing a politics of protest that the BSCP had done more to forge than any other organization.
By skillfully placing the union efforts of anonymous railway workers in their proper place at the forefront of the 20th Century struggle for black civil rights, Beth Tomkins Bates has given us a book of inspiring vision. This is an American story worth remembering and celebrating.
