Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Coming up soon on the show, we're going
Speaker 1: to have an episode on labor organizer and civil rights
Speaker 1: activist A. Philip Randolph. One part of his work that
Speaker 1: gets the most attention is his effort to organize the
Speaker 1: Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters. In this upcoming episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to cover him in a lot more depth than
Speaker 1: Nuance and just that one bit. We covered the Brotherhood
Speaker 1: of Sleeping car Porters in our February twenty six, twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen episode, and we're bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic.
Speaker 1: So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Prie. So, Holly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you took like US history classes that talked about
Speaker 1: the Civil rights movement, do you feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of the focus was on the things that African Americans
Speaker 1: were not allowed to do? So like almost the integrity
Speaker 1: of the focus. Yeah, So, like being barred from the
Speaker 1: schools and the restrooms and other whites only places, being
Speaker 1: kept from voting, being denied legal protections that white people
Speaker 1: really took for granted, Like all of that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff feels like a big part of the context for
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement in history classes in the United States,
Speaker 1: for sure. So there's actually a whole other part of
Speaker 1: that equation, which is the things that only African Americans
Speaker 1: were allowed to do. There were jobs that used an
Speaker 1: entirely black workforce as a way to subjugate people and
Speaker 1: maintain a racial status quo. I only became aware that
Speaker 1: this was a thing like as an adult. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1: I definitely do not recall ever having that as part
Speaker 1: of a class well, and even having taken in an
Speaker 1: entire class on social movements a third of which was
Speaker 1: devoted to the civil rights movement in college. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's something that we really got into. But today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about one of these jobs, which
Speaker 1: was the sleeping car porter. In the nineteen twenties, sleeping
Speaker 1: car porters unionized and they successfully fought for better pay
Speaker 1: and working conditions. Their union, which was the Brotherhood of
Speaker 1: Sleeping car Porters, became the first African American labor union
Speaker 1: to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor. While
Speaker 1: the union started out campaigning for more money and better
Speaker 1: treatment for its members. It became an important force for
Speaker 1: social change during the American Civil Rights movement. But before
Speaker 1: we talk about the porters and their union specifically, we
Speaker 1: need to just talk a little bit about trains because
Speaker 1: it's important to contextualize where all this was going on. So,
Speaker 1: by the end of the nineteenth century, the railroad was
Speaker 1: basically the easiest and fastest way to travel long distances
Speaker 1: in the United States, But until an industrialist named George
Speaker 1: Pullman put his stamp on the sleeping car, the trip
Speaker 1: wasn't really comfortable, particularly if you had to travel overnight.
Speaker 1: That's actually still true today. Yes, I've made multiple trips
Speaker 1: by train from Atlanta to Washington, DC that were all
Speaker 1: overnight and it's not comfortable. I had a sleeping car
Speaker 1: one time, and that was marginally more comfortable, but still
Speaker 1: not the like total luxury experience that it became in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. So the Pullman Company put out its
Speaker 1: first sleeper car in eighteen sixty five. These cars featured
Speaker 1: really beautiful and comfortable furnishings. There were berths that converted
Speaker 1: from seats and folded down from the walls. But what
Speaker 1: really set Pullman cars apart from the other sleeper cars
Speaker 1: on the market was their staff of porters, the first
Speaker 1: of whom was hired in eighteen sixty s railroad lines
Speaker 1: who wanted to have Pullman cars as part of their
Speaker 1: trains leased them from the Pullman Company, and a staff
Speaker 1: of maids and porters came along as part of the package.
Speaker 1: And the porter's work was really what made the Pullman
Speaker 1: cars a true luxury experience. They had an exceptional reputation
Speaker 1: for quality and service. The porters would make down the
Speaker 1: beds at night and they would make them back up
Speaker 1: again in the morning. They would brush traveler's coats, they
Speaker 1: would polish shoes. They served meals and beverages, and basically
Speaker 1: attended to every need a passenger might have throughout their journey,
Speaker 1: looking after and cleaning up after sick passengers. They took
Speaker 1: care of people in every possible way, and porters were
Speaker 1: even responsible for the safety and security of passengers, including children.
Speaker 1: And for almost one hundred years, they were also exclusively
Speaker 1: African American. Many of the earliest Pullman porters were recently
Speaker 1: freed slaves, and as the years wore on, the Pullman
Speaker 1: Company made up concerted effort of hiring most of its
Speaker 1: porters out of the Deep South. Once hired, the workers
Speaker 1: mostly worked out of northern railroad hub cities, especially Chicago,
Speaker 1: and George Pullman got a great deal of praise at
Speaker 1: the time for employing so many black workers, but his
Speaker 1: motives were not philanthropic, and he did not try to
Speaker 1: disguise that fact. He chose African American labor for his
Speaker 1: sleeping cars because he knew he would get a workforce
Speaker 1: that was grateful to have a job and would be
Speaker 1: willing to accept low pay and work grueling hours. He
Speaker 1: expected newly freed slaves to be used to being subservient
Speaker 1: to white people, and the white passengers were also accustomed
Speaker 1: to having African Americans around as a servant class. So
Speaker 1: African Americans, for context, could ride these trains, but they
Speaker 1: had to ride in segregated cars, and they certainly were
Speaker 1: not allowed to ride in sleeper cars. Yes, so it
Speaker 1: was basically an exclusively black workforce waiting on a almost
Speaker 1: exclusively white customer base. By the nineteen twenties, more than
Speaker 1: twenty thousand African American men were employed as Pullman porters
Speaker 1: and other train personnel. The Pullman Company became the largest
Speaker 1: employer of African American men and the United States. There
Speaker 1: were also African American maids who worked on the trains.
Speaker 1: There was about one made for every fifty porters in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen twenties, and the job of a pullman
Speaker 1: porter was actually a highly coveted one, and porters were
Speaker 1: very well respected within their home communities. The job did
Speaker 1: not require a lot of heavy manual labor, which was
Speaker 1: rare among jobs for African American men, and porters got
Speaker 1: to travel all over and so they became sources of
Speaker 1: information about jobs and news when they would travel back home,
Speaker 1: and they also, as a consequence, wound up being the
Speaker 1: company's best recruiters because they would return home with stories
Speaker 1: of adventure and travel, and they would have pockets full
Speaker 1: of tips. So it looked like a very glamorous, uh
Speaker 1: you know, really pretty cushy job to a lot of people, yes,
Speaker 1: but in reality, porters worked extremely long hours for not
Speaker 1: much money. A pullman porter in the twenties had to
Speaker 1: work four hundred hours or travel eleven thousand miles in
Speaker 1: a month, whichever came first, to earn his full pay.
Speaker 1: So if you're doing math in your head right now,
Speaker 1: that is thirteen to fourteen hours a day every day
Speaker 1: with zero days off during the month, or about two
Speaker 1: round trips all the way across the country from New
Speaker 1: York to San Francisco. The base salary for this work
Speaker 1: was about eight hundred and seventeen dollars a year in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. I looked at a bunch of different
Speaker 1: ways to calculate how much this means today, and they
Speaker 1: are widely Yeah, it's hard to do the transliteration on
Speaker 1: yeah time. Yeah. So if you really really want a number,
Speaker 1: we can call it about twenty two thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: thirty or thirty one, thirteen or fourteen hour days minimum.
Speaker 1: And I was whining earlier about how angry I get
Speaker 1: just having to get up in the morning. Most porters
Speaker 1: actually made more in tips than they did in salary,
Speaker 1: and added together this These two incomes often made up
Speaker 1: for more money than many other jobs open to African Americans,
Speaker 1: but it was much much less than white people could
Speaker 1: make in other pulling company jobs. For example, porters made
Speaker 1: much less than the conductors, who were all white, yet
Speaker 1: they often had to do the work of the conductor.
Speaker 1: Porters also had to spend a lot of their pay
Speaker 1: on things that they needed for work, including food, uniforms,
Speaker 1: and shoe polish. They also had to pay for their
Speaker 1: own lodging during layovers, and if passengers walked off with
Speaker 1: colmbs or towels or other small items, as often happens
Speaker 1: in any kind of situation like that, it was stocked
Speaker 1: from the porter's pay. And then there they were parts
Speaker 1: of the job that were really quite frankly degrading. For example,
Speaker 1: the porter's blankets were never allowed to be mixed with
Speaker 1: the passengers blankets in the wash, and to achieve this,
Speaker 1: they were color coded, so the porter's blankets were blue
Speaker 1: and the passengers blankets were a sort of salmon color.
Speaker 1: When the passenger blankets started to wear out and become
Speaker 1: unfit for use, they would be dyed blue, and then
Speaker 1: those worn out blankets would be given to the porters.
Speaker 1: The porters didn't get to use these blankets much though
Speaker 1: most of them got to sleep a maximum of three
Speaker 1: hours a night, and that really was a maximum they were.
Speaker 1: There'd be nights when they didn't sleep at all. We're
Speaker 1: using this thirteen to fourteen hour a day numbers an average.
Speaker 1: In reality, there were days off and they would be
Speaker 1: working more like twenty one hours in a day for
Speaker 1: most of their working time, so they did not get
Speaker 1: a lot of sleep. They also had no berths assigned
Speaker 1: to them. Porters usually had to sleep on couches in
Speaker 1: the smoking car behind a screen, and they were not
Speaker 1: allowed to clear the car so that they could sleep.
Speaker 1: Porters were also required to answer to the name of George.
Speaker 1: This was a holdover for when slaves were referred to
Speaker 1: by their master's names, and just as often they were
Speaker 1: called not by a name at all, but by a
Speaker 1: racial slur that we are not interested in repeating here.
Speaker 1: You could probably guess what it is, and it was
Speaker 1: pretty much a given that calling a porter George meant
Speaker 1: the same thing as using that slur. Because of segregation,
Speaker 1: it was also entirely possible for porters to have no
Speaker 1: safe place to sleep and nowhere to get food during layovers,
Speaker 1: and the company really didn't do anything to compensate for that.
Speaker 1: Porters who tried to address any of these issues at
Speaker 1: the company faced retaliation in the form of being branded
Speaker 1: troublemakers or even just fired. So the porters, you know,
Speaker 1: recognizing that there were conditions about their work that they
Speaker 1: would like to change, tried to unionize three times between
Speaker 1: nineteen oh nine and nineteen thirteen. One of these was successful,
Speaker 1: but the company realized that had a problem, so it
Speaker 1: started its own union, the Pullman Porter's Benefit Association, in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen. Its first chairman, Arthur A. Wells, was actually
Speaker 1: George Pullman's personal assistant and his attendant in his private car.
Speaker 1: The company also established the Employee Representation Plan in nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: which was purportedly to focus on getting better pay. It
Speaker 1: docked the money to fund this plan out of the
Speaker 1: porter's salaries, so it had basically the company recognized its
Speaker 1: labor issue quote and then tried to address it by
Speaker 1: making this kind of company run union. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: wasn't the only time that the Pullman Company had really
Speaker 1: taken the bull by the horns to try to solve
Speaker 1: labor problems. In eighteen eighty, the Pullman Company built the
Speaker 1: town of Pullman, which was south of Chicago, as worker housing,
Speaker 1: and from the outside it really looked like a wholesome
Speaker 1: place to live, but the company controlled everything about it,
Speaker 1: down to what books the library could have. It was
Speaker 1: a dry town and the only place that served alcohol
Speaker 1: was a hotel, but you could only get alcohol there
Speaker 1: if you were a guest and not a resident of
Speaker 1: the town. So when a depression started in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: four and residents couldn't afford to live on what was
Speaker 1: left after the company payroll deducted their rent, it contributed
Speaker 1: to a strike that was so bad the federal government
Speaker 1: had to intervene. George Pullman's relationship with his employees was
Speaker 1: contentious enough that when he died in eighteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: he left instructions that he'd be entombed in steel and
Speaker 1: concrete so that disgruntled employees could not desecrate his body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's an adversarial relationship. Quite adversary, but extremely mildly well.
Speaker 1: And the town of Pullman is a fascinating story on
Speaker 1: its own. It had kind of an extremely weird Stepford
Speaker 1: quality about it. The company would come and search people's
Speaker 1: homes just because because it was really a surveillance state
Speaker 1: for the people who were living there. So back to
Speaker 1: the porters. Finally, in nineteen twenty five, a New York
Speaker 1: porter named Ashley L. Totten got four other porters together
Speaker 1: in secret, and together they approached a man named a
Speaker 1: Philip Randolph to help them start a union and to
Speaker 1: lead it once it was off the ground. A. Philip
Speaker 1: Randolph had never worked for the Pullman Company, he'd never
Speaker 1: even ridden in one of its cars, but he did
Speaker 1: have a long history and a notorious reputation for labor activism.
Speaker 1: He was also a pacifist, he was an atheist, and
Speaker 1: he was a socialist. So in short, that meant that
Speaker 1: he basically had enemies everywhere. But he was an excellent
Speaker 1: advocate and he was really devoted to the cause of
Speaker 1: labor rights at this point. He had a long history
Speaker 1: of political activity, including a very long effort to encourage
Speaker 1: African Americans to unionize and to advocate for themselves in
Speaker 1: labor issues. So after some initial reluctance, he decided to
Speaker 1: help start a union. And before we talk about the union,
Speaker 1: would you like to take a moment and talk about
Speaker 1: a word from our sponsor that sounds spectacular. Now on
Speaker 1: to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It had its
Speaker 1: first meeting on August twenty fifth, nineteen twenty five, and
Speaker 1: it published a list of demands in The Messenger, which
Speaker 1: was a magazine that A. Philip Randolph had co founded
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventeen. Among These demands were a significant pay raise,
Speaker 1: abolishing the practice of tipping, providing adequate rest breaks, and
Speaker 1: increasing the pensions. And the porters also demanded that a
Speaker 1: name card be placed in each car so that passengers
Speaker 1: could call them their actual names instead of George. And
Speaker 1: it may seem kind of odd that they would want
Speaker 1: to abolish tipping since that was a source of income,
Speaker 1: but because porter's base pay was so low, they had
Speaker 1: to be comple completely subservient and ingratiating to white writers
Speaker 1: at all times in the hope of getting a better
Speaker 1: tips that they were making a living wage, so abolishing
Speaker 1: tips could lessen, but not entirely remove, one of the
Speaker 1: most degrading aspects of their job. The Pullman Company met
Speaker 1: zero of these demands, and it also did not recognize
Speaker 1: the union as a legitimate organization that it not that
Speaker 1: would negotiate with. It started firing people who were working
Speaker 1: with the union and infiltrating union meetings with spies. And
Speaker 1: because of all the espionage that was going on on
Speaker 1: the company's part, the brotherhood became extremely secretive. There were
Speaker 1: secret passwords, there were secret handshakes. The porter's wives were
Speaker 1: also instrumental in maintaining secrecy. They formed an ancillary network
Speaker 1: to distribute information and even attend on their husband's behalf
Speaker 1: if spies were said to be present. The porter's wives
Speaker 1: eventually formed what was called the Ladies Auxiliary, which campaigned,
Speaker 1: they held fundraisers. They helped keep the union members morale
Speaker 1: up during the really long effort to get official recognition,
Speaker 1: and without the Ladies Auxiliary, the Brotherhood probably would have failed.
Speaker 1: Espionage was also only one way that the company tried
Speaker 1: to out maneuver the union. The Pullman Company started by
Speaker 1: negotiating pay raises with the in house unions try to
Speaker 1: make it look good. These were much much smaller raises
Speaker 1: than what the union or you know, the Brotherhood was
Speaker 1: came paigning for. It also started strategically hiring people it
Speaker 1: thought would be more compliant, and it also did its
Speaker 1: share of media spin about how well paid and well
Speaker 1: treated its employees were, including publishing articles to that effect
Speaker 1: in the Black Papers. It also cooked its numbers with
Speaker 1: its own polls that it conducted to make it look
Speaker 1: like eighty five percent of the porters were in favor
Speaker 1: of the in house union and not the Brotherhood of
Speaker 1: Sleeping Car Porters. And the Brotherhood's effort to be recognized
Speaker 1: went on for twelve extremely difficult years. There was name
Speaker 1: calling on both sides. The company branded unions of porters
Speaker 1: as communists and the union branding porters who wouldn't join
Speaker 1: as traders to their race. The company intimidated people who
Speaker 1: talked about joining, and the union intimidated people who didn't join. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind of an ugly fight on both sides
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. And then in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, the union nearly collapsed following a call for
Speaker 1: a strike that never got off the ground. The Brotherhood's
Speaker 1: membership started to drop because people were starting to feel
Speaker 1: really frustrated about the fact that nothing was actually changing.
Speaker 1: Membership was had between nineteen twenty eight and nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: and then again by nineteen thirty one. Then, thanks to
Speaker 1: the Great Depression, the threat of job loss made people
Speaker 1: even more reluctant to be involved in the union, so
Speaker 1: by nineteen thirty three it only had six hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty eight members. But in nineteen thirty four, President Franklin
Speaker 1: Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged
Speaker 1: collective bargaining and gave the union a legal footing that
Speaker 1: it had not had before, and membership started to grow again.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty five, the Pullman Company finally sat down
Speaker 1: with Randolph and other members of the union to negotiate
Speaker 1: for the first time. Two years later, the Pullman Company
Speaker 1: finally recognized the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters. The Brotherhood
Speaker 1: signed its first labor agreement with the company on August
Speaker 1: twenty fifth of that year. This agreement raised the minimum
Speaker 1: salary from seventy seven dollars and fifty cents to eighty
Speaker 1: nine dollars and fifty cents a month. That might not
Speaker 1: sound like the most monumental pay increase, but it was
Speaker 1: for two hundred and forty hours of work, not four hundred.
Speaker 1: The agreement also guaranteed sleeping time, it established a procedure
Speaker 1: for handling grievances, and gave some other benefits as well.
Speaker 1: Over the years, the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters continued
Speaker 1: to negotiate with the Pullman Company. The monthly pay, when
Speaker 1: averaged out to an hourly rate, was eventually better than
Speaker 1: that of engineers, conductors, and other railroad positions that were
Speaker 1: at that point held by white people. Working conditions improved
Speaker 1: as well. Gradually, the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters also
Speaker 1: turned its attention to helping other labor organizations integrate the
Speaker 1: jobs that had previously been acceptable only for white people.
Speaker 1: As a side note, it was apparently an all white
Speaker 1: organization of guys named George called the Society for the
Speaker 1: Prevention of Calling Sleeping car Porters George that convinced the
Speaker 1: Pullman Company to put name cards for the porters in
Speaker 1: the cars. Yeah. These were basically white people named George
Speaker 1: who objected to the associations with their name that were happening. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if the name Tracy had become
Speaker 1: some sort of racial slur and you and all the
Speaker 1: other Tracy said that's not cool. I think my motivation
Speaker 1: would be a little different than than the organization's motivation was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was probably one that they did not want to
Speaker 1: be associated right with black people. But they did eventuallyually
Speaker 1: move away from the practice of just calling everyone George.
Speaker 1: So the Pullman Company made a practice of buying up
Speaker 1: a lot of its competitors, and in nineteen forty the
Speaker 1: United States Department of Justice filed an anti trust complaint
Speaker 1: against the company. In the end, the company was ordered
Speaker 1: to divest itself of either its business of operating sleeper
Speaker 1: cars or its business of building sleeper cars. If this
Speaker 1: sort of rings a bell in your mind, it was
Speaker 1: cited as a precedent in the Microsoft anti trust case.
Speaker 1: This case continued to shake out through the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen forty seven, Pullman formally handed over ownership
Speaker 1: of the sleeping car business to a consortium of fifty
Speaker 1: seven railroads. The Brotherhood continued to negotiate with the railroads,
Speaker 1: and by this point it was no longer an exclusively
Speaker 1: African American organization. It also represented white barbers, maids from
Speaker 1: the Philippines and others working in service positions on the railroads.
Speaker 1: At about this same time, the Brotherhood and its leadership
Speaker 1: and its members also started to become a force for
Speaker 1: equal rights outside of their working life. So in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, many African Americans moved to urban areas where
Speaker 1: defense work was in full swing because there was a
Speaker 1: huge demand for workers as part of the war effort.
Speaker 1: The problem was once they got there, African Americans often
Speaker 1: faced harassment and discrimination, and there was a federal hiring
Speaker 1: system that favored white people. Randolph and other black leaders
Speaker 1: actually met with Eleanor Roosevelt and members of the cabinet
Speaker 1: promising a protest march on Washington. On June twenty fifth
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty one, FDR issued Executive Order eight eight
Speaker 1: zero two, which said, in part quote, I do hereby
Speaker 1: reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall
Speaker 1: be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
Speaker 1: industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
Speaker 1: After World War Two, Randolph was also part of the
Speaker 1: effort to integrate the American army, and thanks in part
Speaker 1: to his campig but also to the realities of needing
Speaker 1: the black vote to win reelection, President Harry S. Truman
Speaker 1: banned segregation of the armed forces through Executive Order nine
Speaker 1: nine eight one on July twenty sixth, nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: Randolph was also a director of the March on Washington
Speaker 1: for Jobs and Freedom, at which doctor Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: Junior gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. Ed Nixon,
Speaker 1: whose name you may remember from our recent episode on
Speaker 1: Rosa Parks, worked on the Montgomery bus boycott. He was
Speaker 1: also a sleeping car porter, and in fact he took
Speaker 1: himself out of the running to be president of the
Speaker 1: Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the position that was held
Speaker 1: by doctor Martin Luther King because of his work schedule.
Speaker 1: Like Ed Nixon, other Pulman porters became civil rights activists
Speaker 1: in their own hometowns. The Brotherhood and its members had
Speaker 1: gone up against white power structure and eventually won. Because
Speaker 1: of the nature of their jobs, the porters were also
Speaker 1: acutely aware of the effects of racism and discriminate. The
Speaker 1: porters used all this experience to become important sources of
Speaker 1: information and organization throughout the civil rights movement. They also
Speaker 1: smuggled and distributed pamphlets and literature bypassing the mail system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you had places where corrupt mail officials were
Speaker 1: just trashing things instead of delivering them, they had a
Speaker 1: way to work around that by using this network of
Speaker 1: sleeping car porters. The railroad really dropped off as a
Speaker 1: means of travel in the nineteen sixties thanks to the
Speaker 1: rise of air travel and the interstate highway system. The
Speaker 1: number of pullman porters working really just dropped precipitously. There
Speaker 1: were only about three thousand of them by nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: and after the Civil rights movement, and in spite of
Speaker 1: the involvement and leadership on the part of so many members,
Speaker 1: a lot of people really stopped seeing the Pullman porters
Speaker 1: as the labor and civil rights champions that they had
Speaker 1: been for so many years, and instead they remembered the
Speaker 1: part where African American porters kowtowed white passengers for tips. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the saddest things about this
Speaker 1: whole story. It really is. You have a group of
Speaker 1: people who worked so hard for so long to take
Speaker 1: ownership of their jobs and to gain a measure of
Speaker 1: dignity in a job that was inherently demeaning in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. But today the takeaway to a lot
Speaker 1: of people is this image that's offensive, really and completely mischaracterized. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Brotherhood of Sleeping car porters merged with the Brotherhood
Speaker 1: of Railway airline steamship clerks, freight handlers, express and station
Speaker 1: employees in nineteen seventy eight. That is a very long
Speaker 1: name for basically what was a similar organization of service
Speaker 1: positions in travel. And this was just because at that
Speaker 1: point there weren't really sleeping cars in that way anymore.
Speaker 1: And as for a Philip Randolph, he was awarded the
Speaker 1: Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen sixty four. He died
Speaker 1: on May sixteenth of nineteen seventy nine. Is a really
Speaker 1: great book called Rising from the Rails Pullman Porters and
Speaker 1: the Making of the Black Middle Class, which is by
Speaker 1: Larry Tye and uh. One of the awesome things about it,
Speaker 1: in addition to the fact that it gives a chronology
Speaker 1: of the whole like the job of sleeping car porter
Speaker 1: and the the work of the union and the progress
Speaker 1: that was made over the years, is that the author
Speaker 1: tracked down as many living pullman porters as he could
Speaker 1: find or their families like immediate family members and children,
Speaker 1: to talk to them about what the job was like,
Speaker 1: and about what their lives were like, and about what
Speaker 1: the time was like. And so there are just so
Speaker 1: many first person accounts in this book. If you are
Speaker 1: interested in it at all, you you should. You should
Speaker 1: check it out and take a look at it. It
Speaker 1: is a very interesting story with many things that we
Speaker 1: have not talked about here. There's also a book called
Speaker 1: Marching Together, Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters,
Speaker 1: which is something that we only touched on a little
Speaker 1: bit today. The Sleeping Car Porters at various points also
Speaker 1: had and Maids in its name because there were also
Speaker 1: maids working on the cars, but the porters definitely get
Speaker 1: more attention in terms of historical accounts and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Speaker 1: Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
Speaker 1: heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something
Speaker 1: similar over the course of the show, that could be
Speaker 1: obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
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