When a Pullman Palace Car was leased to a railroad, it came staffed with highly trained porters to serve its travelers. Pullman Porters worked graciously receiving passengers, carrying their luggage, making up their rooms, serving foods and beverages and keeping the guests happy throughout every excursion. Emancipated blacks found work with the newly formed Pullman Palace Car Company as porters immediately following the civil war. By the year 1920, Pullman Company employed more black workers than any other corporation in the United States.
The Pullman Porter was a highly respected within his neighborhood. His steady income, travel and exposure to the rich and famous made him an icon among his peers. He was a source of information for the black community as he carried culture, stories and opportunity from the north to south, and east to west. However his 400-hour per month work schedule and increasingly degrading working conditions drove him to seek better treatment.
In 1925 the Pullman Porters formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; the nations first black labor union. Over the next several decades, the Brotherhood would work on behalf of the porters for higher pay and better working conditions. Labor rights gave way to the Civil Rights Movement; the Labor Rights Movement empowered Blacks with the money to do the things that the Civil Rights Movement made legally possible. The same leadership from Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters would years later help to plan the March on Washington of 1963 where Martin Luther King delivered his immortal speech, “I have a Dream.”
Have a Pullman Porter in your family tree? Please register them at the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Musem.
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