Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters - Organizing The Union

Organizing The Union

At that time the African American community was estranged from organized labor. While the AFL nominally did not exclude black workers, many of its affiliates did. Many black workers saw their employers, whether it was Henry Ford in Detroit or Swift Packing in Chicago, as more sympathetic to them than either their white co-workers or the labor movement. In addition, the economic separation, deprivation, and marginalization of the black community forced by Jim Crow and the doctrine of advancement through self-reliance preached by Booker T. Washington led many black leaders to look with distrust on joining with whites on issues of common concern — and often denied that blacks and whites had any common interests at all. Furthermore, and foremost, white supremacy remained entrenched in most every institution that existed in the US, and these racist beliefs, both subtle and overt, precluded the white labor movement from recognizing the black workers or its organized fronts.

In the 1920s, as some elements within the AFL began to lower these barriers, while groups as diverse as the Urban League, the Socialist Party of America and Communist Party began to focus on the rights of black workers. Randolph himself was a prominent member of the Socialist Party. From its inception, the BSCP fought to open doors in the organized labor movement in the US for black workers, even though it faced staunch opposition and blatant racism. As BSCP co-founder and First Vice President Milton Price Webster, put it, "...any time we have an American institution composed of white people there is prejudice in it....In America, if we should stay out of everything that's prejudiced we wouldn't be in anything."

As early as 1900, efforts were put forth by various collectives of Pullman porters to organize the porters into a union, each effort having been crushed by the Pullman company. In 1925, in the early days of organizing the BSP union, Randolph was invited, by BSCP union organizer Ashley Totten, to address the Porters Athletic Association, in New York City in 1925. Exhibiting a sound understanding of the plight of the black worker and the need for a genuine labor union, Randolph was asked to undertake the job of organizing the porters into a bona fide labor union. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched on the night of August 25, 1925.

Key to the success of the union was to galvanize membership by way of a national membership drive, with three of the Pullman companies three biggest terminals being most important stops—Chicago, Oakland, and St. Louis. The man to see in Chicago was Milton Price Webster. He was the son of enslaved parents from Clarksville, Tennessee, who, after successfully purchasing their own freedom, eventually moved to Chicago, where Webster was raised. A former Pullman Porter of twenty years, and a devoted husband (Louie Elizabeth Harris) and father of three, Webster had been fired by the company for attempting to organize porters in the Railroad Men's Benevolent Association. Webster was a man of strong convictions. As a Lincoln Republican and a tenured, highly respected captain of Chicago's Sixth Ward black Republican machine, Webster was a stern, but gregarious leader of men who was well connected throughout the Chicago politic. Not the orator of Randolph's skill, and not college educated, Webster devoured books and the news of the day, and a was stalwart back room negotiator. He captured his audience with his command of the subject, his keen wit and sharp intellect, and his commitment to alleviating the struggles of the working man. Although, skeptical of Randolph's socialist affiliations, on the recommendations of fellow union organizer John C. Mills of Chicago, Webster facilitated a series of public meetings for Randolph and Chicago porters, nightly for two weeks. At the initial meeting, after hearing Randolph speak, Webster turned to Mills, agreeing that Randolph was the man to head the organization of the new union. For the next two weeks, nightly meetings were held, with two speakers campaigning for Chicago chapter membership—Milton Webster opening and A. Philip Randolph closing—effectively launching the Chicago division of the Brotherhood.

The Pullman Company's response was to denounce, with support from the ministers and African American newspapers whom it had cultivated (or bought), the new union as an outside entity motivated by foreign ideologies, while sponsoring its own company union, variously known as the Employee Representation Plan or the Pullman Porters and Maids Protective Association, to represent its loyal employees. Local authorities, such as Boss Crump in Memphis, Tennessee in some cases helped the Company by interfering with or banning BSCP meetings.

For the first several years of its existence, the union continued fighting the Pullman Company, its allies in the black community, the white power structure, and rival unions within the AFL that were hostile to its members' job claims. They also successfully fought efforts by communist to infiltrate the BSCP. The BSCP also tried to involve the federal government in its fight with the Pullman Company: on September 7, 1927 the Brotherhood filed a case with the Interstate Commerce Commission, requesting an investigation of Pullman rates, porters' wages, tipping practices, and other matters related to wages and working conditions; the ICC ruled that it did not have jurisdiction.

While it had organized roughly half of the porters within the Company, the union was seemingly no closer to obtaining recognition than it had been in 1925. By 1928 BSCP leaders decided that the only way to force the issue was to strike the Company. The leadership was, however, divided on what a strike could accomplish: some rank-and-file leaders wanted to use the strike as a show of strength and an organizing tool, while Randolph was more cautious, hoping to use the threat of a strike as the lever to get the federal National Mediation Board established pursuant to the Railway Labor Act to bring the Pullman Company to the table while mobilizing support from supporters outside the industry. After secretly meeting with the Pullman Company, the NMB refused to follow precedent it had set in the case of a group of white railroad workers, and refused to act in behalf of the BSCP. The NMB argued that the Brotherhood was incapable of disrupting the Pullman sleeping car service. Although the union had voted for a strike, the Pullman company convinced the NMB that the union did not have the strength in numbers or resources to pull it off. In July 1928, the NMB formally retired the case and Randolph called off the strike just hours before it was scheduled to begin. Randolph, Webster, and the leadership of the BSCP recognized, in the end, that a strike at that time would have seriously crippled the Brotherhood, agreeing that the Brotherhood was still not strong enough to carry off a strike against the powerful corporate giant like Pullman.

That provoked an internal crisis, deepened by the Great Depression, paucity of funding for the union, and perpetual reprisals against the porters by the Pullman company, which led to a sharp drop in BSCP membership. The union might have disappeared altogether if it had not been for the vigilance and dedication of Randolph, Webster, Totten, Mills, C.L. Dellums, Bennie Smith, S.E. Grain, E.J. Bradley, Paul Caldwell, George Price, C. Francis Stratford and Roy Lancaster, and who formed the initial organizers and board members of the BSCP.

The relationship between Randolph and Webster, the long standing First Vice President of the BSC and the head of the Chicago division, was centered on their common devotion to a common cause. Differences in personal style, politic and perspective gave way to comradeship, mutual admiration, and a deep and abiding trust and friendship. Both formidable leaders, where Randolph mastered theoretical, economic, and political discussions, Webster mastered the rules, regulations and working conditions of the laborers. Together they had a mutually aggressive and genuine commitment to the imperative that the black worker be organized to improve the working conditions, workers rights and the lives of black workers, their families and their communities.

The union held on through the worst days of the early 1930s until 1934, when the Roosevelt administration amended the RLA, then passed the Wagner-Connery Act, which outlawed company unions and covered porters under the Act, the following year. The BSCP immediately demanded that the NMB certify it as the representative of these porters. The BSCP defeated the company union in the election held by the NMB and on June 1, 1935 was certified. Two years later the union signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company.