Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters | 239 W. 136th St.

Turn left, heading south on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Make an immediate right onto W. 136th St. Keep walking until you encounter the apartment building that once housed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (239 W. 136th St.).

By Alyssa Greene

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first African American-led labor union to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

In the 1880s, the Pullman Company established sleeping cars and employed African Americans to serve as porters and maids to a mostly white clientele. Although comparatively better off than workers in other trades, porters and maids worked long hours for little pay and lacked job security; they also had to pay for their own food, lodgings, and uniforms.

Although service was perhaps the most visible aspect of a porter’s job, his primary responsibility was to ensure safety in the car. The porter had to know how to operate every mechanical and electrical feature of the Pullman car; sometimes, he was injured in the process.

The maids worked as white women’s attendants and domestic workers. They were responsible for keeping the interior spotless and helping female passengers fix their hair and mend clothing, among other things. Although many tasks were required for the job, the Pullman Company instituted race-based wage discrimination, which automatically classified African Americans as unskilled laborers. Porters thus had no chance of being promoted to conductor despite often performing the same duties. In addition, porters and maids faced countless indignities from passengers as well as employers.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, porters tried to organize politically but faced fierce opposition. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph, a Black labor activist, founded the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (abbreviated BSCP, despite the inclusion of the maids).

The BSCP had to fight for recognition on three fronts: against the Pullman Company, the American Federation of Labor, and popular opinion within the Black community, which saw the Pullman Company as providing good jobs. As a labor organizer, Randolph emphasized the paternalistic nature of the Pullman Company’s relationship to its Black employees.

While the AFL did not technically exclude Black members, many of its affiliates did. Since racism was prevalent within the labor movement, many members of the Black community were justifiably skeptical of Randolph’s politics. Nevertheless, Randolph worked tirelessly to build rank-and-file support. In 1928, the BSCP was able to leverage the threat of a strike and bring the Pullman Company to the bargaining table.

Once President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal brought about a shift in the political climate as well as labor law, the Pullman Company officially recognized the BSCP in 1935. That same year, the AFL granted the BSCP a charter. In 1937, the BSCP won its first contract. Randolph utilized his access to the American Federation of Labor’s meetings to advocate for black workers’ equality with white workers and oppose racism within the labor movement.

The BSCP helped build networks between Black communities across the country, and members went on to play a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, E.D. Nixon, president of the BCSP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama for many years, played a crucial role in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.

*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in July 2016:

The continued salience of A. Philip Randolph’s astute words in his famous March on Washington speech in 1963 have an eerie prescience for ongoing debates about racial profiling, joblessness, and welfare states today. Speaking of the civil rights movement, he said:

We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom. This revolution reverberates throughout the land touching every city, every town, every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited. But this civil rights revolution is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not.

[...]

We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines. Now we know that real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.

The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits—for we are the worst victims of unemployment. Negroes are in the forefront of today’s movement for social and racial justice, because we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations.

[...]

Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.