THE MESSENGER SERIES | VOL. 1 - The Pullman Porters
COLLABORATION
BROKEN CLOCK BREWING cooperative
DATE
00.00.0000
LABEL ART
ELLE RHODES
A. Phillip Randolph was a writer, a Pullman porter, a Black man in America, and a ravenous trailblazer. Through Randolph’s detailed accounts of his own and his fellow brethren’s life as Pullman porters, he was able to place a stark illumination on the odious labor circumstances each Pullman had to endure on a daily basis.
With the average wage being around $810 a year and the untenable expectation to work 400 hours or travel a globe trotting 11,000 miles a month before any reprieve was allowed. They were seen merely as a device to mollycoddle the white passengers whims. On the train their names meaningless, instead they went by the nomenclature of ” George” the same name of the man who owned the sleeping train cars “George Pullman”. This among many other discrepancies pushed Randolph to seek refined treatment in the workplace, thus a union needed to be formed.
However the porters couldn’t go about manifesting this so desired union in the open and had to organize underground. From this a brotherhood was created and an operation set in place to thwart nefarious tactics like propaganda, spies and flagrant acts of intimidation.
These obstacles put in place by the union busters were no match for the combined efforts of Helena Wilson, future organizer and matriarch of the “Colored Women’s Economic Council”, and the wives and families of Pullman Porters across the country. It was their creative means of currency acquisition and education of union organization that made them into the binding grip that allowed the brotherhood to stay unified.
While the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was formed in 1925, it wasn’t until 1937 that the union became officially recognized by a major American corporation. Better working hours, increased sleeping time and the elimination of rates by mileage were just a few of the many improvements to the Pullmans workplace. It was through these ameliorated work conditions that the civil rights movement arose.
E.D. Nixon was a Pullman porter and after paying for Rosa parks bail placed a blossoming Martin Luther King at the head of the Montgomery bus boycott.
The community that was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who were once former slaves, rose to become the harbinger of the civil rights movement and later after copious amounts of contention the civil rights act.