A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Cornelius L. Bynum

Author:Cornelius L. Bynum
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Struggle for Union Recognition

When a group of Pullman porters approached A. Philip Randolph about helping them form a union in August 1925, he quickly envisioned the radical potential of such an enterprise. Randolph believed that not only could the nascent Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters mark “an epochal stage in the life of the Pullman porter,” but that it could also serve as “a significant land-mark in the history and struggle of the Negro workers in America.”1 Equally important, however, was the practical opportunity it created for him to put into action his ideas about the relationship between socialism and the race problem. Previously, he had come to view social justice as a function of workers’ ability to extract economic concessions from industrial capitalism through labor unions.2 He initially believed that the Brotherhood would be an ideal way of illustrating the common class interests that black and white workers shared; he saw the porters’ union as central to drawing African Americans more deeply into the general labor movement. Instead, he discovered that in corporate boardrooms and on the shop floor, race still trumped class in that racial discrimination severely limited the effectiveness of strict class theory in addressing the needs of black workers.3 As the impact of the Great Depression spread in the late 1920s and 1930s, this realization forced Randolph to revise his views on industrial unionism and insist that black workers simultaneously pursue their general class interests while also attending to their particular racial needs.

Though the idea of forming a porters’ union may have seemed like a radical notion at the time, Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was in fact only one of many attempts by black railway workers to organize bona fide trade unions.4 As Randolph explained, as far back as 1910 there were perhaps as many as “a half dozen or more Pullman porters’ movements … started from time to time.”5 Two unions in particular succeeded in recruiting significant memberships. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Protective Union and the Railway Men’s International Benevolent Industrial Association both were organized in the years surrounding World War I when the federal government nationalized railroads under the National Railroad Administration and began to endorse union activities among railroad workers.6 Unfortunately for Pullman porters, neither organization made much progress in protecting their interests. As with previous attempts to organize black Pullman employees, both the Porters’ Protective Union and the International Benevolent Industrial Association failed. In both cases, Randolph explained, either porters were “maneuvered into accepting Company benevolence,” or the company’s well-maintained spy system exposed and victimized the organizations’ leadership with “intimidation through the loss of jobs.”7

In place of these kinds of independent labor organizations, the Pullman Company offered its porters membership in the company-run Employee Representation Plan (ERP). A typical company-sponsored employee association, Pullman’s plan fit squarely with the business spirit of the American Plan of labor relations that sought to defuse labor radicalism through welfare capitalism and the anti-labor tone of the Transportation Act of 1920, which restored the railroad industry to private ownership.

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