"The brotherhood of sleeping car porters"

Was the in 1935, the first labor organization led by African-American to receive in the

American Federation of Labor (AFL).It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railroad and Airline Clerks (Brac),now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.The leaders of the BSCP-including Asa Philip Randolph,its first president,Milton Price Webster its vice president, and C.L. Dellums,its vice president and second president,and second president,became leaders in the Civil rights movement and continued to play a significant role in it after it focused on the eradication segregation in the South.BSCP members such as Edgar Daniel Nixon were among the leadership of local civil rights movements by virtue of their organizing experience,constant movement between communities and freedom from economic dependence on local authorities.The Campaign to found the union was an extraordinarily long one,that put it at odds with not only the company but also many members of the black community.The Pullman Company was not only one of the largest employers of black in the 1920s and 1930s but also had created and image for itself enlightened benevolence by its financial support for black churches,newspapers,and other organizations.many porters were,moreover,well-paid enough to enjoy the material advantages of a middle-class lifestyle and prominence within their own communities.Working for the Pullman Company was, however,less glamorous in practice than it appeared from the outside.Porters were dependent on tips for much of their income;that in turn,made them dependent in the whims of white passengers,who often referred as "George,"the first name of George Pullman,the founder of the company.Porters spent roughly ten percent of their time in unpaid "preparatory and "terminal"set-up and clean-up duties.Had to pay for their own food,lodging,and uniforms,which might consume half of their wages,and were charged whenever their passengers stole a towel or a water pitcher.Porters could ride at half fare on their days off-but not on Pullman coaches.They also could not be promoted to conductor,a job reserved for whites,even though they frequently performed many of the conductors' duties.The Company also squelched any efforts they had made to organize a union during the first decades of the twentieth century by either isolating or firing union leaders.Like many other large,ostensibly paternalistic companies of the time, the Company employed a large number of employee spies who kept the company informed of employees' activities; in extreme cases,Company agents assaulted union organizers.When 500 porters met in Harlem on August 25 1925,they decided to make another effort to organize.During this meeting,they  not only launched their campaign in secret,but also chose Asa,as  an outsider beyond the reach of the company,to lead it.The union chose a dramatic motto that summed up porters'resentment over their working conditions and their sense of their place in history:"Fight or Be Slaves.At the time the African-American community was estranged from organized labor.While the AFL (The American Federation of Labor),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 white-coworker or the labor movement.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 American and Communist Party began to focus on the rights of black workers.Asa himself was a prominent member of the Socialist Party. From its inception,the BSCP fought to open doors in 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 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,Asa 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,Asa was asked to undertake the job of organizing the porters into a bona fideCrump 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 field 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 show of strenght and an organizing tool,while Asa was more cautious,hoping to use the threat of a strike 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 Pullman Company,the NMB refused to following 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 NHB that union did not have the strenght in numbers or resources to pull it off.In July of 1928,the NMB formally retired the case and Asa called off the strike just hours before it was scheduled to begin.Asa Milton,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 of a strike against the power 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 had been for the vigilance an dedication of Asa,Milton Ashley,C.L. Dellums,Bennie Smith, S.E. Grain. E.J.Bradley,Paul Caldwell,George Price,C.Francis Statford and Roy Lancaster,and who formed the initial organizers and board members of the BSCP.The relationship between Asa and Milton,the long stand 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 Asa mastered theoretical,economic,and political discussions,Milton 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.The BSCP won a charter from the AFL in 1935,the same year it was certified by the NMB.In the years before then,when the AFL refused to recognize the organization itself,Asa accepted "federal local" status for a number of locals of the BSCP -an unsatisfactory compromise that assumed that these locals had no union of their own,and allowed them to affiliate directly with the AFL on that basis.That half-measure,however,allowed Asa into AFL conventions and other meetings,where he advocated organizations of black workers on an equal footing with whites.Asa kept the BSCP in the AFL,where most of the railroad brotherhoods remained,after John L. Lewis led the spilt that resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.Asa expanded his agenda once he became leader of the foremost black labor organization in the U.S. Asa was chosen as the leader of the National Negro Congress,an umbrella organization founded in 1937 that united many of the major of the black civil rights organizations of the day.Asa later resigned from the NNC in a dispute over policy with communist activist within it.The NCC went into eclipse,while Asa stature continued to grow.In 1941 he used the threat of a march on Washington and support from the NAACP,Fiorello La Guardia and Eleanor Roosevelt to force the administration to ban discrimination by defense contractors and establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee  to enforce that order.Milton Webster,the BSCP'sFirst Vice-President,worked to make the FEPC an effective tool in combating employment discrimination.Asa achieved his other demand-the end of racial segregation with in the military-seven years,later,When President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 banning it.BSCP members played a significant role in the U.S. Civil rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s.E.D.Nixon,a BSCP member and the most militant spokesperson for the rights of African-Americans in Montgomery Alabama for most of the 1940s and 1950s,exemplified the leadership that the union provided.E.D. could take advantage of his experience organizing under difficult circumstances and hisco ummunity to economic reprisals from local businesses and authorities.BSCP members also helped spread information and create networks between the different communities their work took them to,bringing the newspaper and political ideas they picked up in the North back to their hometowns.Asa helped negotiate the return of the CIO to the AFLBSCP had 15,000 members,to the 1960s,when only 3000 porters had regular runs. After four decades of service as the First Vice President of the BSCP Milton Webster designated to be Asa successor as Brotherhood President when Asa retired.That transition never occurred.In 1965 Milton suffered a fatal heart attack at the American Hotel in Bal Harbour,Florida while he and Asa were attending and AFL-CIO Convention.C.L. Dellums replaced Asa as president of the BSCP IN 1968.The BSCP merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks BRAC a decade later.C.L. successor and last president of the BSCP as an independent organization,Leroy J.Shackeford,became president of BRAC's Sleeping Car Porters Division.In 1984,the Sleeping Car Porters Division was combined,along with Amtrak clerical employees,into a new Amtrak Division of the union having approximately 5000 members,3500 clerical and 1500 in on-board services,comprising the largest single unit of organized labor on the Amtrak system.Upon Mr. Shackeford retirement in 1985,his position was not filled,its duties devolving upon the General Chairman of the BRAC Amtrak Division,Michael J. Young,and his successors.Thus ended the direct lineage of BSCP leadership,with Young becoming the first non-African-American to lead the on-board group.