1925 - Race and the Railroads
Not all railroad labor activism centered on union recognition, wages, or working conditions. The racial composition of the labor force proved to be a motivating factor in the determination of white union strategy. Until the 1950s and 1960s, membership of the principal railroad brotherhoods was all white, as constitutional bars and membership rituals kept out African Americans and other non-whites.
White trade unionists relied upon tactics including strikes, political lobbying, and in some cases, racial terrorism, to reduce the number of—or eliminate entirely—black railroaders in the operating service. For example, members of the all-white Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen struck the Georgia railroad (leased by the anti-union Louisville & Nashville railroad) in 1909 when the superintendent of the Atlanta Terminal yards removed 10 white workers, replacing them with 10 blacks at a lower cost. During the three-week long strike, whites denounced the very presence of blacks on board locomotive engines, and white strikers and sympathizers attacked black workers and white strikebreakers along the Georgia Railroad's route.
White firemen were unsuccessful in removing blacks in 1909, but they later renewed attacks on African-American workers in the operating trades with more success. In 1911, white firemen on the Queen and Crescent railroad struck over the race issue in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. At Kings Mountain, Kentucky — at the entrance of one of the railroad's longest tunnels — armed mountaineers stopped freight trains. A group of 25 whites attacked several black firemen, driving one from the train and shooting several others. In January 1919, white switchmen struck in the rail yards of Memphis, Tennessee, demanding the dismissal of their black counterparts.263 Following World War I, railroad companies and the federal government proved more responsive to white unionists' demands for limitations on black railroaders. Until the 1940s and 1950s, new black hires dropped in response to white union pressure.
Black trade unionism on the railroads took root in the service sector where blacks faced little competition from whites. Pullman porters, who captured popular attention over the years, put the issue of African-American trade unionism on the map of American labor and industrial relations in the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was led for over four decades by the charismatic black radical, A. Philip Randolph.
The union contended not only with opposition from a staunchly anti-union corporation—which employed spies, a company union, and the blacklist to slow the Brotherhood's progress—but initially with opposition from black elites and the black press as well. The Pullman Company did offer jobs to black workers in an industry known for its pronounced racism, and it did offer advertising and other patronage to black editors and institutions. The battle for recognition, then, was an uphill one from the start. From 1925 to 1937, the BSCP suffered setback after setback.
The BSCP drew upon the energies and resources of its membership and those of the larger African-American community. By the 1930s, Randolph and his fellow organizers had secured the support of a wide range of allies, including the AFL, numerous black editors, and black ministers. Indeed, during the Great Depression and beyond, the Brotherhood held many of its organizing and business meetings in black churches. When it sponsored a national labor conference in 1930, attended by white AFL officials, delegates of the Brotherhood, and black political and social leaders, it chose the Metropolitan Community Church on Chicago's South Side to hold its public mass meeting.
The Central Baptist Church of Pittsburgh was the location of its 1934 "monster mass meeting" to call for the adoption of amendments to the Railway Labor Act. In Kansas City, Missouri, the Paseo Baptist Church (located at 2501 Paseo) was the site of a BSCP convention in 1937, while the Bethel A.M.E. church of Detroit hosted the second annual Michigan Economic and Industrial Conference, which Randolph addressed. In Chicago, porters held numerous meetings at Du Sable High School, on State Street at 49th. In June 1936, some 2,000 porters, families and friends heard BSCP vice-president Milton P. Webster recount the history of the porters' fight to unionize and explain the union's policy of fighting "race prejudice in the A.F.L. from within," following AFL president William Green's presentation to the BSCP of its international charter.
The union finally won its long battle for recognition. Benefiting from its organizers' skill, rank and-file commitment, and a changed political environment (in which New Deal legislation promised workers the right to elect a bargaining agent of their own choosing), the union was victorious in its 1935 representation election.
Two years later, the Pullman Company signed its first contract with the black union. Salaries went up, hours went down, job security improved, and grievance procedures, to a degree, protected workers' rights. The NAACP's Crisis concluded, "As important as is this lucrative contract as a labor victory to the Pullman porters, it is even more important to the Negro race as a whole, from the point of view of the Negro's uphill climb for respect, recognition and influence, and economic advance."265 From its inception to the 1960s, the BSCP also functioned as a civil rights organization, taking action in both local communities and in national politics. Without question, the BSCP had emerged as the premier union of black workers in the nation and retains historical attention even today.
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