Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945

by Beth Tompkins Bates

Between World War I and World War II, African Americans' quest for civil rights took on a more aggressive character as a new group of black activists challenged the politics of civility traditionally embraced by old-guard leaders in favor of a more forceful protest strategy. Beth Tompkins Bates traces the rise of this new protest politics--which was grounded in making demands and backing them up with collective action--by focusing on the struggle of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to form a union in Chicago, headquarters of the Pullman Company.

Bates shows how the BSCP overcame initial opposition from most of Chicago's black leaders by linking its union message with the broader social movement for racial equality. As members of BSCP protest networks mobilized the black community around the quest for manhood rights and economic freedom, they broke down resistance to organized labor even as they expanded the boundaries of citizenship to include equal economic opportunity. By the mid-1930s, BSCP protest networks gained platforms at the national level, fusing Brotherhood activities first with those of the National Negro Congress and later with the March on Washington Movement. Lessons learned during this era guided the next generation of activists, who carried the black freedom struggle forward after World War II.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Labor, Race, American History

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 is am amazing look at race relations in the 20th century. Beth Tompkins Bates uses many sources to tell the story of how Black men pushing for a union challenged the dynamics of race relations. George Pullman shaped the job of porters to recreate racial hierarchies and let White people, both those who worked with the Black porters and maids and passengers relish in their own Whiteness.

There is a cost to such work as Black men and women had to mask their own sentiments. Challenges the racial boundaries could mean losing your job, as many of the early organizers, like Milton Price Webster in Chicago. However, Webster remains in the struggle. On the job these workers learned and gained skills in negotiating with White people. Oppressive working conditions motivate a group to approach A. Philip Randolph who moved from New York City to Chicago, the city with the most porters, to help them build a union. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) played a huge role in bringing Black men and women into unions, which were known for racial exclusion.

The struggle for union recognition would go on for years, but it was important to not only mobilize the porters, but to challenge the pattern of negotiating for improving race relations that had been established for decades. Black people, including leaders, had to pay deference to paternalistic White people and request rights and ask for assistance. Much of this dynamics is about the time, since the oppression kept Black people poor needing philanthropy to establish schools, hospitals, and other institutions. In the era between the wars much changes, as migration has meant more significant communities and chances for Black people to support their own enterprises. Yet, it also brings people who are ready to challenge the status quo. Bates talks about “new crowd protest politics,” that challenges the NAACP and establish patterns of asking for social change. We have people like Randolph who are making demands, talking about citizenship in new ways and drawing parallels between second class citizenship and slavery.

The BSCP are not just looking to enhance their own lives, but the wider community. There are conferences and meetings in churches in Chicago and other major cities. Initially challenges by the Black press and the old guard, slowing they come to recognize the Black working class that had been forgotten and was now mobilizing and making demands. As we approach and then enter WW II, Black people demand their rights to work in war industry jobs and make this a fight for democracy at home as well as abroad. There are many actors and there are tensions, but Bates does provide a descriptions of the March on Washington Movement, which talks about bringing 100,000 people to the city to protest. Under pressure and after much negotiations, Roosevelt does issue Executive Order 8802 that prohibits discrimination in the war industries. It does not totally open the armed forces, which remain segregated, but creates new pathways for Black man and women to earn a decent living. Many White workers protest, but we are getting protest on all sides as people adjust to new thinking.

Randolph knew that power was necessary to change the status quo, otherwise Roosevelt would make promises forever. Others learned from this model and he had much support. Yet, over time the alliances are challenged. Yet, the seed were planted and this “new crowd protest politics” will shape the challenges that come after World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s.

My own father was a Pullman Porter in the 1920s and 1930s, working the route between Chicago and New Orleans. This book helped me understand the Chicago he lived in and how his own thinking was shaped by ideas of full citizenship, including recognizing the right to employment as a right of citizens. My father was also active in pushing for the rights of others. He learned a lot working on the train, in terms of seeing injustices, but the union and community organizing helped him see remedies.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bates details in this book how the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters went from being an outlaw group of marginal radical porters, all African-Americans, to helping spark a larger social movement of African-Americans and laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement. Centering around their socialist leader, A. Phillip Randolph, the BSCP took on the dominant long trip rail transport company in the Pullman company, who after the Civil War, hired exclusively African Americans as their porters. Though being a Pullman porter was considered a good job in black communities across the United States, to the point where the Pullman company was often defended by black clergy as a friend to the black community, the porters themselves were underpaid, overworked, and had no chance of ever becoming a conductor or any other sort of promotion.

Bates argued that Randolph and the BSCP tapped into a larger black socialist politics that veered at times into nationalism. The "New Negro" movement or the New-Crowd, as Bates termed it, challenged older generations of civil rights activists, like the NAACP, who had pulled back from collective demands and were focused on individual cases of discrimination. Bates demonstrated how the BSCP was able to slowly overcome hostility from black clergy, black media, and anti-labor sentiment through engagement with militant tactics, building images of manhood in the black community, and collective enhancement by challenging the total domination of Pullman over the porters. The book traced how the BSCP nearly went on strike, but pulled back when it was in danger of collapse, only to rebuild in the 1930s, got contracts with Pullman (the first all-black union in the nation to win a contract), to the point where they'd helped launch the March On Washington Movement. The MOWM successfully force FDR to issue an executive order that outlawed racial discrimination in war defense plants in the midst of the massive hiring spree as the nation geered up for war. Here, the BSCP became a more than a union, but a larger movement that helped launch the larger civil rights movement.

While at points, the book is a bit hard to follow as the subjects in a few chapters switch rapidly, and I'd like to have followed the BSCP more specifically after 1945 as it supported the Civil Rights movement and black power, it's a good understanding how Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were able to eventually win.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bates’s scrupulously documented study of the politics of mass demonstrations and militant demands chronicles twenty years of strategizing, disagreements, and compromises among groups working for the full participation of Negros in the workforce of the national economy and the long overdue recognition of their civil rights.

It’s a history of the rivalry between competing labor unions, especially the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, religious leaders, women’s clubs, industrialists, and politicians on how to advance the cause of equality at work and in America society, and the social, political and economic forces working to retard them or push them back.

Progress comes with the outbreak of the Second World War, when the March on Washington Movement and the threat of 100,000 Black Americans marching on Washington forces a reluctant President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802.

The approach used by Randolph in gaining Executive Order 8802 exemplified the collective mass-based strategy espoused by the new crowd. Rather than balancing interests and negotiating as individuals for the interest of all disenfranchised black Americans, Randolph, with the Brotherhood and the march committee, directly confronted discrimination using the threat of the ‘meaning of our numbers.’

The essence of Executive Order 8802 stated that:

As a prerequisite to the successful conduct of our national defense effort, I do hereby reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and I hereby declare that it is the duty of employers and of labor organizations, in furtherance of said policy and of this order, to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin.

Although the march itself did not take place in the 1940s, the militant protest inspired strategy and organization of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, and lead to the 1963 March on Washington numbering according to the District of Columbia police to be about 210,000 people which led to the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very educational. Read for AFAM 162.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but oh boy was it a slog.

The early parts of the book were able to convey a good sense of the state of labor in the late 19th and early 20th century and why the black community was so largely hostile to unions and labor organization.

The mid sections about the BSCP and its philosophical and organizational descendants was interesting but mired in a bog of acronyms and the recounting of factional associations, alliances and splits, board members and power players, as they shifted over the years. I would have liked a few more in depth case studies of individual actions or protests rather than what seemed to be more timelines and attendance rosters.

By the end the BSCP was barely mentioned, though it was again able to paint an interesting textural picture of the social landscape surrounding black labor militancy, but it seemed to just trail off as the story of the major players in the early century waned in power and the end ofWWII upended everything domestically.

Maybe those with more knowledge of the of specific types of labor actions mentioned in the book will be able to get more out of it than I did.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great topic. Just too much was crammed into this writer's style. Not well organized or easy to follow, especially with the acronyms that were constantly used.