Black Pullman Porters, Their History is Our History
Chicago businessman George M. Pullman began hiring thousands of African American men—including many former slaves to serve the needs of white passengers traveling across the country on his company’s railroad sleeping cars. These Black workers were underpaid and overworked and had to endure constant racism on the job. The Pullman porters would eventually help to fuel the migration of Blacks to the Southwest and West and shaped the Black middle class. Their social position improved as civil rights struggles began to increase after WWII. By the mid-1890s, a “Railway Union” organized Pullman employees, but refused to include Black workers on the rail lines. Eventually, Black Pullman Porters organized into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) under the leadership of A. Phillip Randolph.
However, the Pullman Company opposed A. Phillip Randolph. Blacks eventually organized their first collective bargaining agreement which went into effect making history as the first union contract signed by Black workers and a major U.S. company in 1937. In San Antonio, Delbert McKinney, an African who used his Pullman Porter wages to purchase a new car in the 1930s. McKinney, a porter on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy line) railroad, McKinney worked to organize Black railroad porters to fight labor rights. McKinney’s’ labor activism was well documented in San Antonio’s Black Newspapers.
In 1940, the members of Local No. 3, of the Black Pullman porters at St. Paul Square (Sunset Station), elected Delbert as president, and he attended the Texas Federation of Labor as one of more than dozen Black delegates who worked to enact anti-discrimination practices at the convention. The Black Pullman porters stayed at the Black owned Deluxe Hotel in St. Paul Square and at boarding houses in the Denver Heights and at other places identified in the Black motorist handbook (The Green Book) at the time. Several homes were identified on Dawson Street, Swiss Street, Canton Street, and other areas where Pullman Porters could stay while waiting for their next assignment on the rail line.
Porters were essentially at the beck and call of first-class White passengers; hence they were often invisible as things and not as human beings. The owner of the Deluxe Hotel, Pinkie Smith, a Black entrepreneur, greeted and befriended the Black porters at his business, both locally and out the area Black workers on the Southern Pacific Rail. Following the arrival of the railroad in 1877, the area experienced significant growth and then expanded further in 1902 after the Southern Pacific Passenger Depot was constructed. Black porters had to endure hatred of all types while working on the train.
All Black men were called by their first names or were referred to as “Boy.” According to Professor Ronald Davis, “If the white person did not personally know a Black person, the term “nigger” or “nigger-fellow,” might be used. In legal cases and the press, Blacks were often referred to by the word “Negro” with a first name attached, such as “Negro Sam.” At other times, the term “Jack,” or some common name, was universally used in addressing Black men not known to the white speaker. On the Pullman Sleeping cars on trains, for example, all the Black porters answered to the name of “boy” or simply “George” (after the first name of George Pullman, who owned and built the Pullman Sleeping Cars).” Black leader Charles Bellinger was a gambler and often paid the train tickets for his friends to ride the train from San Antonio to Chicago. Also, the train was worked by Black porters on the way to New Orleans and New York.
