Twelve Years to the Day: The Porters Win a Contract

The job in 1925 came with a number attached to every part of it. A porter had to travel 11,000 miles a month before he started earning base wages. He averaged 27.8 cents an hour, against 54.8 cents in manufacturing. He worked more than 73 hours a week. He bought his own food, his own lodging on layovers, and his own uniform. When a white passenger tipped him, the passenger called him "George," after George Pullman, because a porter was not understood to have his own name.

On August 25, 1925, roughly 500 porters met in Harlem and asked A. Philip Randolph, a Harlem socialist and magazine editor who had never worked a Pullman car, to lead a union. They picked him precisely because he was outside Pullman's reach. Pullman could not fire a man it had never hired. Milton Webster, a former porter of twenty years, took the Chicago division and the first vice presidency.

What followed was a twelve-year slog. In 1928, Randolph called off a scheduled strike in the final hours after the federal Mediation Board, following secret meetings with Pullman, refused to back the union. The company ran spies through every lodge. It paid off porters to inform on meetings. It kept a company union, the Employee Representation Plan, in place to crowd out the real one.

The women broke the surveillance. Six weeks after the Brotherhood was founded, porters' wives, daughters, and Pullman maids organized the first Women's Economic Council. Pullman was not watching them. They did the door-to-door work, the literature drops, and the community fundraising that a watched porter could not risk. Halena Wilson led the Chicago Colored Women's Economic Council from 1930 and later the International Ladies' Auxiliary. Rosina Corrothers Tucker, a Washington, D.C. organizer who personally visited porters in their homes and kept the local alive through the leanest years, won election as International Secretary-Treasurer of the Auxiliary in 1938.

The New Deal moved the floor. In 1934, Roosevelt signed amendments to the Railway Labor Act. The Wagner Act followed in 1935 and outlawed company unions. On June 1, 1935, the National Mediation Board certified the Brotherhood as the exclusive representative of Pullman porters. Later that year, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first Black-led union chartered by the American Federation of Labor.

On August 25, 1937, twelve years to the day after the founding meeting in Harlem, Pullman signed. The contract covered roughly 12,000 porters and maids. It cut the working month from 400 hours to 240. It raised wages substantially across the workforce. It established, for the first time, a formal grievance procedure that did not depend on the goodwill of a supervisor.

It did not win everything. The contract did not move porters into the higher-paid brakeman pay pool. The job-ladder ceiling that kept Black railroad workers below the line held. Jim Crow in the work classification survived the signature.

At the Second National Negro Congress in 1937, Randolph put the lesson on the record in words that have outlived him: "Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted."

The 1937 contract was a floor, not a ceiling. Randolph used the base the porters built to threaten the 1941 March on Washington that pried Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries, out of FDR. He used it again in 1963 to stand at the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement did not start with a bus in Montgomery. It started with porters counting miles.

Sources

• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union Formed (Library of Congress, This Month in Business History)
• The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Chicago History Museum)
• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
• Rosina Corrothers Tucker (National Park Service)
• A. Philip Randolph, Second National Negro Congress, 1937 [NEEDS BETTER SOURCE: AZQuotes is a pointer only; locate UAW archive link or LoC Randolph Papers (Manuscript Division) for the primary citation]