Founded on August 25, 1925, by A. Philip Randolph, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first African American labor union to secure a collective bargaining agreement with a major corporation, the Pullman Company.
With the decline of passenger rail travel in the 1940s and 50s, the union merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC), a predecessor union of today’s Transport Communications Union (TCU/IAM).
The following excerpt praising the early rise of the BSCP was published 100 years ago in BLET’s membership magazine, the Locomotive Engineers Journal:
“Inside of one year, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters has organized over 5,000 Pullman porters and maids, over half the total number employed, and has invoked the aid of the United States Railroad Mediation Board in obtaining recognition from the Pullman Company as the proper organization to represent the porters in their demands for an increased wage.
“The rapid growth of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is one of the most striking events in recent labor history. Confronted by a giant corporation backed by the Morgans and Vanderbilts with net profits exceeding $14 million a year, a half dozen courageous organizers have routed the Pullman company union, organized the employees under conditions of utmost difficulty, and exposed the bribes paid to editors, clergymen, and lawyers by the Pullman Company to help crush the new Brotherhood.
“The growing power of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters has already wrested an eight percent ‘voluntary’ wage increase from the Pullman Company. The porters intend to get more.
“More power to the newest Brotherhood in the railway industry!”
(From the November 1926 issue of the Locomotive Engineers Journal. For more information about BSCP and the Rexall train pictured above, please read David D. Perata’s 1996 book titled “Those Pullman Blues: An Oral History of the African American Attendant.”)