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

Beth Tompkins Bates

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807875360
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

CHAPTER ONE

No More Servants in the House

Pullman Porters Strive for Full-Fledged Citizenship

So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive
barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much
mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black man begins
to dispute the white man’s title to certain alleged bequests of the
Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his
attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity;
when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste,—
then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready
to believe that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right.

W. E. B. DU BOIS, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920)

The nearest thing to a slave observable in this country is the Pullman porter. He has the same color, to begin with, and to conclude, he toils under conditions that are not remarkably dissimilar.

From America: A Catholic Review of the Week (1927)

Shortly after the Civil War, when George Mortimer Pullman revolutionized intercity travel with his Pullman sleeping cars, he consciously recruited recently freed slaves for the position of porter. He did so, as his official biographer noted, because they had been “trained as a race by years of personal service in various capacities, and by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness.”¹ The Pullman porter was a servant whose job was to attend to all the needs of passengers as they traveled across the country on Pullman’s luxurious hotels on wheels. When George Pullman created the Pullman porter to serve his passengers, some predicted that this new niche would improve the occupational status of African Americans within American society.²

Although the question of Pullman porter status remains open, no one disputes the fact that the porter helped make the Pullman Company an industrial giant in corporate America. By the 1920s, over 35 million passengers annually slept on Pullman sleeping cars, served by approximately 12,000 porters, making Pullman the single largest private employer of African Americans in the United States. A key factor in the company’s success was the style of service delivered by porters. For the price of a ticket on a sleeping car, a white person could be pampered and waited on in the manner once reserved for privileged gentry in the antebellum South.³ Porters were, according to one of the company’s executives, “Pullman’s greatest assets,” and the company featured a smiling, submissive-looking black servant in its advertisements for Pullman sleepers.⁴

By the twentieth century, the Pullman porter was a national figure, perhaps the most easily recognized African American in white America. As early as 1913, Hollywood had such demand for Pullman porters in films that one actor made a good living—much better than actual porters—cast as a porter for nearly three decades.⁵ In the 1927 silent movie, The Girl on the Pullman, a porter was portrayed as bowing and grinning, while receiving a handsome tip from his customer.⁶

To the white public patronizing Pullman sleeping cars, porters often were not fully formed, three-dimensional characters; they were just “George”—after the founder of the Pullman Company. The implication was that porters were the property of George Pullman.⁷ Although slavery images were not necessarily on the minds of white clients when they called for “George,” the person who responded to that call was, as Murray Kempton observed, “at once omnipresent and nonexistent” to the customer.

The Pullman porter rode his car, silent with all the chaff round him, always most agreeable when he was of the old school, accepting the generic designation of “George” as though it were a balm instead of an affront, a domestic apparently unaltered by the passage of time or the Emancipation Proclamation. . . . Any white man who spoke to him spoke consciously to a Negro, which is a terrible barrier even for the best of men . . . life was a process of enforcing recognition of his personality from a world which treated him as possessed of color without feature. It was always mixing him up with the porter in the car ahead and asking him in simple bewilderment if he was its porter, because he was, after all, only a piece of furniture set out for the convenience of persons who saw no need to be connoisseurs of this sort of furniture.”⁸

Within the black community, the porter was a model citizen and enjoyed a measure of prestige since he had fairly steady employment.⁹ On the road, Pullman porters connected rural African Americans with news from urban areas. Black youth, in particular, looked up to them as agents of exotic ideas from faraway places, like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They distributed copies of the Chicago Defender at stops throughout the country, which boosted circulation, and helped make it the largest selling black newspaper in the United States with a circulation exceeding 200,000 by 1925.¹⁰ Managing editor Lucious C. Harper credited the paper’s wide circulation—two-thirds of which was outside of Chicago—in part to its practice of giving Pullman porters copies to distribute en route.¹¹ Not only did porters make extra money distributing news of the wider world and its possibilities, they became spokesmen for African Americans and influenced the historical and cultural formation of black America. ¹² Edgar Daniel Nixon, an ex-porter and civil rights activist, conveys the role porters played.

Everybody listened because they knowd the porter been everywhere and they never been anywhere themselves. In cafes where they ate or hotels where they stayed, they’d bring in the papers they picked up, white papers, Negro papers. He’d put ’em in his locker and distribute ’em to black communities all over the country. Along the road, where a whole lot of people couldn’t get to town, we used to roll up the papers and tie a string around ’em. We’d throw these papers off to these people. We were able to let people know what was happening.¹³

On the job, Pullman porters sustained a cloak of invisibility, smiling as though they were content with the racial status quo. It was a protective mechanism that shielded them from the charge of stepping out of place—the place assigned by the white world—or “being uppity.” The porter’s role, as one historian observed, resembled that of the black minstrel who wears a mask on stage to protect not just his self-esteem, but also to shield the actor from revealing his true feelings toward the audience.¹⁴ Benjamin McLaurin, a Pullman porter in Chicago during the 1920s, made a similar observation: porters wore two faces in order to survive.¹⁵ As Thomas Holt might explain the process, porters had been “marked” or stereotyped by the culture of Pullman labor relations as “natural” servants. The status was recreated in the Pullman car on every trip by the traveling public, whose “seemingly trivial” and innocent expectations reinforced the myth that porters were content and happy; after all, they were always smiling.¹⁶

The issue of achieving status and recognition as fully formed human beings ultimately united the larger black community and Pullman porters against the Pullman Company. Within the black community, issues of human dignity were often referred to as manhood rights, drawing from the ongoing African American quest for participation as equal human beings in American society. The Great Migration and World War I unleashed yearnings for all of the rights that black Americans—as both citizens and workers—had long been denied, desires that shaped the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement in the twenties.

When a group of porters set out to form an independent union in 1925, they anchored their challenge to the Pullman Company in a call for “manhood rights,” connecting the union effort to a larger impulse in black America against the pariah status to which African Americans had been relegated. In this chapter, we explore the place of Pullman porters as labor aristocrats within the social matrix of black America and as workers without full citizenship in their native land.

The Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company Creates “George” for the Traveling Public

When discussing their work, Pullman porters sometimes noted that “Lincoln freed the slaves, and the Pullman Company hired ’em.”¹⁷ There is a measure of truth in this assessment. At the end of the Civil War, George Mortimer Pullman built a sleeping car like no other that existed at the time. Called the “Pioneer,” the car transformed the industry in terms of comfort and elegance. The Pullman sleeping car, as Eric Arnesen points out, “addressed not merely passengers’ need for rest but their psychological preference for luxury as well.”¹⁸ Before the Pioneer, “sleepers” were hard, uncomfortable, and crowded; each car cost no more than $5,000 to build. The Pioneer—fully equipped and ready for service—cost over $20,000. “Never had the wildest flights of fancy imagined such magnificence,” according to Pullman’s biographer.¹⁹ The interior featured “brocaded fabrics . . . door frames and window sashes . . . of hand worked and polished woods . . . a plush red carpet, and several gilt-edged mirrors [that] reflected the light of silver-trimmed coal-oil lamps.”²⁰

Before George Pullman could realize a return on his investment, he needed to sell his concept of a palace on wheels to both railroad companies and the traveling public, for he had constructed this impressive car—longer, wider, higher, and heavier than any other railroad car—without a contract for its use. The car, located in Chicago, was so large that before it could run, bridges, trestles, and station platform dimensions needed alteration. Had President Lincoln not been assassinated, Pullman might have gone broke before he could persuade railroad companies to change the space allotted for passage of rail cars. It was Pullman’s good fortune that when the body of Abraham Lincoln reached Chicago, state officials, who wanted the very best conveyance to carry Lincoln to his final destination in Springfield, Illinois, chose the Pioneer. All along the way, the new sleeping car was hailed as a conveyance of beauty. He soon received contracts from several rail lines willing to make the necessary alterations, and in 1867 had organized the Pullman Palace Car Company.²¹

To win the hearts of the public, George Pullman added distinctive service by creating the position of Pullman sleeping car porter to serve his patrons in a princely manner. Porters were at the beck and call of customers to prepare berths, clean the cars, and render whatever small services customers desired to make them comfortable while traveling. In order to maintain a smooth-running operation, Pullman carefully divided the work of his employees between conductors who sold and collected tickets and porters who waited upon clients.²² That Pullman hired only white men to be conductors and only black men to be porters may have seemed fitting to him in 1867. Indeed, he once claimed, according to historian William Harris, that black Americans were chosen out of concern for their welfare in the aftermath of the Civil War, a time when black workers were anxious to leave agriculture and enter new occupations. Nevertheless, black Americans could not be conductors on his sleeping cars, and very few black workers found employment in maintenance shops in Pullman yards until World War I.²³ Although until the late sixties African American males were never hired as conductors, who received considerably higher base (monthly) salaries—in 1915, $70 for conductors and $27.50 for porters—they often did the work of conductors as “porters-in-charge,” saving the company a fortune in wages. Finally, the white conductor had supervisory authority over the behavior, actions, and work requirements of the porters.²⁴

Pullman sleeping car porters were exclusively African Americans except for a brief period in the late twenties when the Pullman Company, in an effort to break the back of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), hired Filipino porters. When the BSCP threat persisted, Pullman management abandoned that tactic, returning the position of Pullman sleeping car porter to the preserve of black Americans. At that point, Filipinos were placed in separate job categories as attendants, cooks, and busboys.²⁵

In testimony delivered in 1915 before the U.S. Senate’s Commission on Industrial Relations, Pullman officials explained the company’s preference for African Americans. L. S. Hungerford, general manager, told the hearing that while they found no shortage of applicants in St. Louis and Chicago, they were not always able to hire the “right caliber” of men from northern areas. Management had found that “the old southern colored man makes the best porter on the car.” Not only was the stereotypic older black servant more “pleasant” and “adapted to waiting on passengers,” but he represented an image that was “more pleasing” to white clients than the “younger colored man that is found around in the slums of Chicago.”²⁶

White clients found it easier to have an African American wait on them in the limited and intimate space of a sleeping car, for the social distance that societal caste distinctions had created made the servile black porter seem less intrusive than a white worker. Pullman intended that the smiling, polite porter would increase the comfort level of his clients and that comfort was linked to seeing porters—black men—as servants. Veteran porters talked about white women who thought nothing of undressing in front of them, as if they were invisible. The...