Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

[6] They spent roughly ten percent of their time in unpaid "preparatory" and "terminal" set-up and clean-up duties, and they had to pay for their food, lodging, and uniforms, which could consume up to half of their wages.

From its inception, the BSCP fought to open doors in the 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 of everything that's prejudiced we wouldn't be in anything."

Not the orator of Randolph's skill, and not college educated, Webster devoured books and the news of the day, and was a stalwart back room negotiator.

He captured his audience with his command of the subject, his keen wit and sharp intellect, and his commitment to alleviating the struggles of the working man.

The Pullman Company's response was to denounce, with support from the ministers and African American newspapers whom it had cultivated (or bought), the new union as an outside entity motivated by foreign ideologies, while sponsoring its own company union, variously known as the Employee Representation Plan or the Pullman Porters and Maids Protective Association, to represent its loyal employees.

Local authorities, such as Boss Crump in Memphis, Tennessee in some cases helped the company by interfering with or banning BSCP meetings.

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 it had not been for the vigilance and dedication of Randolph, Webster, Totten, Mills, C. L. Dellums, Bennie Smith, S. E. Grain, E. J. Bradley, Paul Caldwell, George Price, C. Francis Stratford and Roy Lancaster, who formed the initial organizers and board members of the BSCP.

In 1929, the American Federation of Labor granted affiliated status to individual chapters of the BSCP as local unions rather than to the international organization as a whole.

[10] In 1934 the Roosevelt administration amended the RLA, then passed the Wagner-Connery Act,[11] which outlawed company unions and covered porters, the following year.

The BSCP requested the assistance of the National Mediation Board in April 1937, a time when the company was still using informants to report on union meetings.

It went into effect in October 1937, raising the wages of porters and maids, establishing a basic 240-hour month, and providing time-and-a-half overtime pay after 260 hours.

Many of the maids were well-educated African-American or Chinese-American women but were classified as "unskilled service workers," expected to clean berths, care for the unwell, and give free manicures to passengers.

When her husband was fired due to his BSCP work, Rosina C. Tucker successfully demanded his reinstatement; she later became a founding member of the ILA, a recruiter for the BSCP, and a civil rights activist in Washington, D.C.[13][17] Halena Wilson (1895–1975), president of the Chicago ILA, pushed the chapter to fight for wage and price controls and consumer cooperatives and against poll taxes.

Porters working under the Canadian National Railways (CNR) began resistance movements, demanding representation and bargaining rights.

That half-measure, however, allowed Randolph into AFL conventions and other meetings, where he advocated organization of black workers on an equal footing with whites.

Randolph kept the BSCP in the AFL, where most of the railroad brotherhoods remained, after John L. Lewis led the split that resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

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.

[23] Randolph achieved his other demand—the end of racial segregation within the military—seven years later, when President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 banning it.

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.

BSCP members also helped spread information and create networks between the different communities their work took them to, bringing the newspapers and political ideas they picked up in the North back to their hometowns.

Randolph by that time had achieved elder statesman status within the civil rights movement, even as changes in the railroad industry were gradually displacing many of the union's members.

In February 1965, Webster suffered a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida while he and Randolph were attending an AFL-CIO Convention.

[26] The story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was made into the 2002 Robert Townsend film 10,000 Black Men Named George starring Andre Braugher as A. Philip Randolph.