Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

ABBREVIATIONS

PULLMAN PORTERS AND THE RISE OF PROTEST POLITICS IN BLACK AMERICA, 1925-1945

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE - No More Servants in the House

The Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company Creates George for the Traveling Public

Labor Aristocrats in the Neighborhood

No More Servants in the House

Manhood Rights and the Quest for Democracy at Home

Restoring George’s Manhood Rights

CHAPTER TWO - The Politics of Paternalism and Patronage in Black Chicago

The Pullman Company Befriends Black Chicago

Pullman’s Other Family

Patronage Politics

World War I: Fighting for Democracy at Home

CHAPTER THREE - Biting the Hand That Feeds Us

Chicago Clubwomen and the Politics of Manhood Rights

Voices of Opposition

Publicizing the Brotherhood’s Message

Chicago Citizens’ Committee for the Brotherhood

CHAPTER FOUR - Launching a Social Movement, 1928-1930

The Legacy of African American History

The Fourteenth Amendment and Full Citizenship

The June Movement

Labor Conferences Promote a Civil Rights Agenda Anchored in Labor Organization

CHAPTER FIVE - Forging Alliances

Bridging the Gulf between Labor and Civil Rights Groups

Entangling Alliances: New-Crowd Citizens in Action

The NAACP at a Crossroads

Forging Alliances: New-Crowd Networks with Communists

CHAPTER SIX - New-Crowd Networks and the Course of Protest Politics, 1935-1940

The Challenge from Within

The National Negro Congress: A Window on Protest Politics in the Black Community

The Development of NNC Networks: The Case of Chicago

The Financial Crisis and the Ambivalence of Walter White

CHAPTER SEVEN - We Are Americans, Too

Executive Order 8802

The March on Washington Movement

Garvey’s Revenge: The Detroit Conference of the MOWM

We Are Americans, Too

CHAPTER EIGHT - Protest Politics Comes of Age

Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!: New-Crowd Strategies Invade the Workplace

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN SERIES IN

AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

WALDO E. MARTIN JR. AND PATRICIA SULLIVAN,

EDITORS

© 2001 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and

durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book

Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bates, Beth Tompkins. Pullman porters and the rise of protest politics

in Black America, 1925-1945 / by Beth Tompkins Bates.

p. cm.—(The John Hope Franklin series in African American history

and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2614-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8078-4929-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78753-6

1. Pullman porters—Labor unions—United States—History.

2. Afro-American labor union members—Political activity—History.

3. Discrimination in employment—United States—History.

4. Race discrimination—United States—History. I. Title. II. Series.

HD8039.R362 U63 2001 331.88’1138522’097309041—dc21 00-047974

Portions of this work have been published previously, in somewhat

different form, as "A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old

Guard in the NAACP, 1933-1941," American Historical Review 102:2

(April 1997): 340-77, and are reprinted here with permission.

05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MY PARENTS

Marion Duncan Tompkins and

Harold Willers Tompkins

AND TO THE MEMORY OF

Lillian Green Duncan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The list of those who helped me with this book is much longer than these acknowledgments suggest. A few of the many include Robert V. Daniels, Peter Seybolt, Mark Stoler, and the late Milton Nadworny, who planted seeds that led to graduate school while I was a farmer attending the University of Vermont. I left rural Vermont for graduate study at Columbia University where I had the good fortune to work with Eric Foner, my dissertation adviser. When the project was in the formative stage—with many questions and very little focus—he patiently encouraged me. Every day in the archives, his example as a scholar inspired me to dig deeper. At important junctures, he knew how to pose the critical question to push me to consider the implications of my argument, go back to the archives, and dig deeper still. For all this, the manuscript is much stronger. I also value the integrity and humanity that infuse all of his endeavors, an example that has influenced my approach not just to history but to life. While at Columbia, I was also fortunate to be able to work with Elizabeth Blackmar. From the moment I walked into Professor Blackmar’s intellectually scintillating graduate seminar on social history, I began to find my voice. She closely read numerous drafts of this manuscript, pushing me to clarify my often ambiguous positions, and providing encouragement at every step of the process. The book is more nuanced and stronger thanks to the hours of discussion we have had. I shall be forever in debt to her for invaluable brainstorming sessions and for a fuller comprehension of the nature of power relations. Daryl Michael Scott critiqued the manuscript and helped me to understand the larger implications of my research. Joshua Freeman, Robert Lieberman, and Anthony Marx read and critiqued various stages of the manuscript, strengthening the final text. Barbara Jeanne Field’s seminar on the postbellum South was enormously helpful for understanding the terrain that shaped many of the actors in my narrative before they migrated to Chicago, and her own work influenced my approach to the present topic. Hampton Carey provided intellectual sustenance throughout the long process and helped me better understand the context for nineteenth-century political struggles. Tami Friedman and Mai Ngai offered valuable critiques that sharpened the focus.

While in Chicago conducting research I was especially lucky to meet several Chicago historians who provided necessary information for exploring the politics of black Chicago past and present. Charles R. Branham, James R. Grossman, Archie Motley, and Rima L. Schultz provided entree to resources, both in archives and within the black community on Chicago’s South Side, that made this study possible. Rima L. Schultz’s knowledge on the history of Chicago women proved invaluable. Not only did she selflessly share her knowledge of Chicago’s social history with me, but she also helped me sort out the web of connections within local networks. At the Chicago Historical Society, Archie Motley eased the complicated task of piecing together the history of black Chicago through his inspiration, which fuels attention to archival details. He is to the researcher what the muse is to the writer. Rosemary K. Adams and Lesley A. Martin generously took time to help me locate pictures for this book, some of which appeared in an earlier article I wrote for Chicago History. I would also like to thank Greg LeRoy for letting me review his important interviews with Chicago Pullman porters and Timmuel Black, Margaret Burroughs, Ishmael Flory, Michael Flug, Linda Evans, Charles Hayes, and Les Orear for taking time to talk with me about Chicago history.

Several archivists and librarians outside the Chicago history network helped with materials. In Washington, D.C., Randy Boehm offered guidance during my initial search in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car papers. Fred Bouman helped me find my way in the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress. Pablo Calvan came to my rescue on several occasions, locating materials in the Library of Congress that the computer never heard of. Some of my research at the Library of Congress focused on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Parts of an article about the NAACP, which originally appeared in the American Historical Review, are in chapter 5 and chapter 6. Thanks also go to Esme Bahn at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and the staff of the Reuther Library of Wayne State University, especially Louis Jones, Tom Featherstone, and William Lefever.

Colleagues and friends in the greater Detroit metropolitan area have helped me keep up the momentum to complete this project. Earl Lewis found time in his packed schedule to read part of the manuscript, helping me think through the politics of the twenties. Grace Lee Boggs talked with me about her participation in the March on Washington Movement. General Gordon Baker encouraged me with his comments on a chapter of the manuscript. Linda Housch-Collins enthusiastically discussed the project with me, offering valuable suggestions and lots of encouragement. I am especially grateful to the faculty in the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University for steadfast support of my project. In particular, Melba Boyd’s work on Frances E. W. Harper influenced me greatly and sharpened the focus of the discussion on Ida B. Wells-Barnett. On countless occasions, Debbie Hardy Simpson and Michelle Hardy helped me stay on track with both their technical expertise and good humor. I am also grateful for the financial support of the College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs at Wayne State University.

I have discussed this project in various settings, receiving suggestions and testing ideas that sharpened the focus of the manuscript. For comments on papers at professional meetings and in reviews, I want to thank Ernie Allen, John Beck, Carolyn A. Brown, Ardis Cameron, Colin Davis, Elizabeth Faue, Nancy Gabin, Kevin Gaines, Susan Hirsch, Robin D. G. Kelley, Robert Korstad, Peter Rachleff, Randi Storch, and Paul Young. I also benefited from discussions with participants who attended the Black History Workshop, sponsored by the African American Studies Program and Department of History at the University of Houston during the spring of 1998. Thanks to Richard Blackett and Linda Reed for making that possible. Richard Pierce contributed important suggestions for the book that have been the basis for our ongoing discussions of black political history. Timothy Tyson read part of the manuscript and never failed to brighten my spirits with his candor.

Working with the editors and staff of the University of North Carolina Press has been a pleasure. In particular, I want to thank Lewis Bateman for launching the project and David Perry for carrying it forward, as well as Alison Waldenberg, Ron Maner, Elizabeth Gray, and Brian R. MacDonald for their attention to countless details both large and small. Eric Arnesen, a reader for the University of North Carolina Press, reviewed the manuscript with meticulous care and offered suggestions for revision that greatly improved the finished product. A special thanks to Professor Arnesen. I am also grateful to an anonymous reader for reviews and an extremely constructive critique.

A community of scholars and friends guaranteed that this project would finally be finished. Sharon Anderson, Jerry Anderson, David Arsen, Sue Gronewold, Mark Higbee, Martha Kehm, Larry Koblenz, Dr. Lilian Lai, Maggie Levenstein, Margo and Ethan Lowenstein, Bob and Jean McCrosky, Robyn Spencer, and Peter Winn all did their part to make sure I crossed the finish line.

Finally, this book is imbued with support and inspiration from my family. Through his example, my father taught me a love for learning, an inheritance worth more than gold. My mother gave me the grit to keep moving forward. Both never stopped believing in me, even when the needle on my compass pointed in several directions. Brother Barry’s quest to build a twenty-five-foot wooden sailboat from scratch, including the one and a half ton keel, was a model for my project. His tenacity and ability to work independently and creatively with the resources at hand inspired me on numerous occasions. Stephanie Nietzel kept the faith despite the fact that it was taking a long time to finish.

Throughout this process, Tim Bates’s contribution was crucial. Not just because he read, reread, and read yet again every word on every page. Nor because he kept the home fires burning even when there was no fuel. Nor even just because he cheered me on through every phase. He did all that, for which I am grateful. But most important has been his unfailing belief in the project since its inception. What is more, he is also a constant source of joy and the light of my life.

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in the text. For abbreviations used in the notes, see page 189.

PULLMAN PORTERS AND THE RISE OF PROTEST POLITICS IN BLACK AMERICA, 1925-1945

No more powerful a statement of the cause of freedom has ever been stated than in one of the sorrow songs of the race, which eloquently challenges arrogant tyranny, in the immortal phrase: Before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my lord and be saved. We, who have come after these noble souls, who suffered and sacrificed and wept and prayed and died that their children might be delivered from the cruel oppression of the Slave Power of the South, are bound in duty, in reverence and devotion, to re-dedicate our hearts and minds to the unfinished task of emancipation, so that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and that vast throng of unknown and unsung heroes whose hearts beat true to the hymn of liberty, of that matchless champion of human justice, Frederick Douglass, shall not have died in vain. Yes, my brethren, let us stand firm, undismayed, with our heads erect and souls undaunted, ever vigilant and devoted to the Brotherhood whose chart and compass are truth and justice. . . . More hinges on the successful consummation of our job than the welfare of the Pullman porters, the destiny of the entire race is involved.

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, Messenger, April 1926

INTRODUCTION

We are creatures of history, for every historical epoch has its roots in a preceding epoch. The black militants of today are standing upon the shoulders of the New Negro radicals of my day, the twenties, thirties, and forties. We stood upon the shoulders of the civil rights fighters of the Reconstruction era, and they stood upon the shoulders of the black abolitionists. These are the interconnections of history, and they play their role in the course of development.

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH

When Asa Philip Randolph migrated to Harlem on the eve of World War I, he was in search of a place where he could be whole and human. Turn-of-the-century Jacksonville, Florida, where A. Philip Randolph had been raised, offered few opportunities for a well-educated, self-assured, ambitious young African American. During his youth in that Florida community, Randolph had learned valuable lessons about his rights and responsibilities as a citizen, but he realized he must leave the South in order to begin to realize full membership in American society.

In 1927 Richard Wright, like Randolph before him, left the South for the promise of freedom that lay in the mythic land to the north of the Ohio River. As he recounted in Black Boy, my deepest instinct had always made me reject the ‘place’ to which the white South had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in any way an inferior being. Moreover, the white South said it not only knew Wright’s place but also who he was. Wright noted, with some irony, that not only did the white South not know who he was, neither did he. In order to find himself, he had to leave.¹

Wright’s autobiography painstakingly depicts the multiple ways that Jim Crow tried to silence his humanity.² He felt he must go north to free himself from the suffocation of the southern caste system. Randolph went further and thought all African Americans needed to create as much distance as possible between themselves and the social relations of slavery—those customs, beliefs, and practices, recorded by Wright, that, when acted upon and repeated daily in white America, create and recreate racism even as they spawn a rationalization for relegating a group of people to an inferior status.³ Neither Wright nor Randolph found the equality he sought up north: relations between black and white Americans, albeit different from those in the South, were polluted by the refuse from slavery that had floated to northern shores. While Wright used his artistic talents to hurl words into this darkness, narrating the hunger for life . . . to keep alive . . . the inexpressibly human yearnings of black Americans, Randolph dedicated a good part of his life to helping African Americans challenge the legacy of slavery.⁴ Both men were engaged in what Vincent Harding called the struggle to develop one’s whole being.⁵

When Randolph arrived in Harlem in 1911, the lack of self-reliance and independence from white control among African Americans frustrated him. He criticized black leaders who were part of what he called the Old Crowd, subsidized by the Old Crowd of white Americans—a group which viciously opposes every demand made by organized labor for an opportunity to live a better life. As an editor of the Messenger beginning in 1917, Randolph placed the need for new tactics and new leaders high on his agenda for claiming an equal place in society. Black politicians owe their places, not to the votes of the people, but to the white bosses who appointed them, warned Randolph. Power over a man’s subsistence is the power over his will.⁶ Randolph thought the tactics of the Old Crowd of black leaders perpetuated servile relations between black and white Americans. Although slavery as an institution, legalized by the state, had ended in 1865, he believed that certain perspectives and practices engendered under slavery continued to hold the rights of African Americans in thrall well into the twentieth century; black Americans would not be free until they directly challenged servile social relations.

This concern with the legacy of slavery defined the position of New Negroes, who, like Randolph, believed that actual emancipation could no longer be denied.⁷ Legal equality achieved in 1865 did not erase the image of black people as moral inferiors which had been stamped on the consciousness of white America through years of slavery. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, economic competition with black workers was translated by white trade unionists into a high-stakes moral contest involving race: white workers felt accepting black workers on an equal basis would be degrading, which provided a rationale for maintaining racial barriers in unions.⁸ Reluctance to recognize the moral equality of black Americans complicated the task of claiming equal economic opportunity for black workers decades after the end of slavery. Randolph felt that moral inequality and economic discrimination in the workplace were inextricably linked to what Eric Foner reminds us is the unresolved legacy of emancipation, the struggle for equality in social relations, which is still part of our world, more than a century after the demise of slavery.⁹

This book is about a group of African American Pullman car porters, under the leadership of Randolph, who pressed the claim that they had the right, as Americans, to live and work on an equal basis with white Americans. The memory of slavery that was carried forward in the home, the church, and community organizations provided the subtext of the battle by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to claim economic rights of citizenship.

Pullman Company porters were ever mindful of servile relations engendered in the antebellum South, for the work culture for porters, nurtured by the Pullman Company, was inherited from slavery. George Pullman, founder and president of the Pullman Company, consciously perpetuated the link between African Americans and slaves when he chose black men to be porters on his Pullman sleeping cars in the early 1870s. From the beginning, the porter’s job was a black man’s job, and by the end of the century the term porter raised an image of a black person while the term conductor raised the image of a white person. The BSCP organized to rewrite the master-servant narrative which had been fostered for so long by the Pullman Company. The Brotherhood’s organizational campaign drew upon the memories of slavery and emancipation to connect the union’s challenge to the Pullman Company to the larger quest for first-class citizenship in the broader political arena.¹⁰

That quest was given new life during the First World War as thousands of black Americans journeyed north for jobs in industry. Their passage etched new coordinates on the racial map of America, changing the geography of the color line, as African Americans discovered the urban North also had constructed narrowly defined places for black Americans to work and live. Many African Americans seized economic opportunities opened up during the war, bidding farwell to the torturous, confining life in the rural South, to change their status and place within the larger political entity. Despite discriminatory policies of labor unions and employers, which kept black workers in so-called Negro jobs, often those that were hot, dirty, and dangerous, they made significant inroads in manufacturing industries, such as meat-packing in Chicago. In the process, however, tensions with organized labor increased. In Chicago, during organizing campaigns in the stockyards just after World War I, the majority of the 12,000 black packinghouse workers, drawing from their experiences with racist unions in the past, kept their distance from the white man’s union. At the same time, over 90 percent of the white workers favored the union effort. Tension between black workers and white unionists was rooted in the exclusion practiced by the predominately white labor movement. Twenty-four national labor unions, ten of them affiliates of the American Federation of Labor, barred blacks completely.¹¹

Barriers also restricted where blacks in the Promised Land could live, walk, and play. Racially restrictive covenants limited the space allocated for black residents even as the urban black population mushroomed. When one black youth in Chicago innocently crossed over an invisible color line, marking the area restricted by custom to black bathers, on a hot July day, a race riot erupted. It was only one among many racial disorders during the summer of 1919, but it raised again the perennial question, asked by W. E. B. Du Bois, Where do we come in?¹²

In addition, the crusade to make the world safe for democracy unleashed the hope that World War I would mark a significant turning point in the black freedom struggle. Black soldiers who returned from fighting met massive resistance from white Americans, determined that black Americans would not assume an equal place with white citizens. In addition to the race riots, more than seventy lynchings—ten of black soldiers in uniform—and the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated during the first year of peace that America was not safe for black citizens. Historian Carter Woodson had predicted as much when he observed that with northward migration maltreatment of African Americans would be nationalized when both sections strike at this race long stigmatized by servitude but now demanding economic opportunity. African Americans demonstrated their willingness to fight back in their own defense during the postwar racial strife, reflecting the impatience they felt toward a second-class place.¹³

In the aftermath of the war, the quest for full citizenship rights was carried forward through a variety of movements. One was the black nationalist Garvey Movement, based on race pride. In another, African Americans, defining themselves as New Negroes, formed a social movement to put an end to their subordinate place in American democracy. The New Negro Movement, whose leaders included Randolph, Chandler Owen, Cyril Briggs, Hubert Harrison, and many others, showed that they, like Marcus Garvey, had little fear of white men and women and proclaimed that the time for cringing is over.¹⁴

In the wake of the devastation wrought by the summer of 1919 and the economic recession that followed in 1921, leadership of the traditional black betterment organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL), spoke in moderate voices. While James Weldon Johnson, the first black secretary of the NAACP, often used militant rhetoric to rebuke spineless men who are relying on ‘good white friends’ to give them citizenship rights, the black leadership of the NAACP followed an approach that favored moderation over militancy and issuing appeals to white benefactors rather than demanding rights.¹⁵ Not until the late 1930s did the NAACP change course and hew its policies to the interests of the black working class and the politics of a new crowd committed to direct, mass action. By the early 1940s many within the old guard were supporting the protest politics of a new crowd of black activists.

The question is how did the protest politics espoused by the New Negro Movement—what I call new-crowd protest politics—take root in the black community between the wars? To approach such a large question, this study uses the struggle by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to form a union of black workers in Chicago as a vehicle for analyzing the process. In August 1925 a group of disgruntled Pullman porters in New York City asked Randolph to head an effort to form an independent union of porters and maids. Although the effort was successful in New York, the BSCP needed to win support in Chicago, headquarters of the giant Pullman corporation and the city where the largest number of porters and maids lived. The organizing effort stalled when the BSCP headed west to Chicago in October. A major problem was resistance from the majority of the middle-class leaders who, believing porters should not rattle the notoriously antiunion Pullman Company, spoke against the BSCP. At that time black leaders placed little faith in the power of labor unions to advance the interests of black Americans. The BSCP needed the support of the middle-class black community and its institutions because they controlled the press, the pulpit, and public opinion.

This inquiry traces how the BSCP won allegiance in black neighborhoods and used a union movement to counter resistance by addressing the community’s growing concern over citizenship. The story begins by examining political change from the point of view of participants in networks formed under the tutelage of the BSCP, then charts the path that linked the politics of local networks to the national agenda of the NAACP. Thus, the larger concern is how tactics of local protest networks contributed to reconfiguring the range and direction of national protest politics. The argument is that initiatives for changing the approach to gain a more equal place in American society flowed from grass-roots networks to the boardrooms of national black organizations and then back again, somewhat like a double-arrowed chemical reaction in a nonlinear, interactive process.

Hindsight, as David Potter noted in reference to writing about the decade preceding the Civil War, is the historian’s chief asset and his main liability.¹⁶ Potter’s comment reminds us of the risk involved in studying groups that have been hailed as social visionaries, as though the outcome of the organization of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were preordained.¹⁷ In fact, it was the problem of hindsight that led me to the question that important studies on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters raised but never answered. While the struggle of the BSCP against the Pullman Company has been documented with scholarly care, previous histories did not examine fully the relationship between the BSCP and the larger black community.¹⁸ We know that the black press, ministers, and politicians resisted the Brotherhood’s efforts to organize in 1925 but not how long the Brotherhood faced resistance from the larger community, as well as how it was able to proceed without the support of the middle class and the institutions it controlled. Yet, by the time the Brotherhood won its contract from the Pullman Company in 1937, the porters could do little wrong in the eyes of the community and its leaders. The shift was historic: the efforts of the BSCP contributed significantly to changing the antiunion perspective embraced by a large portion of the black leadership class. This study was undertaken with the hope that, by examining the organizational process of the BSCP as it intersected with the black community, I might understand why that community came to support the BSCP, and, further, why the Brotherhood’s initial efforts created such turmoil in middle-class circles.

When the Brotherhood first tried to mobilize support within the community, some members of the black elite claimed that the BSCP threatened to bite the hand that feeds you with its challenge to the Pullman Company, considered a friend of black labor in many circles. Yet, by the early thirties, black, old-guard leaders—once committed to using individual appeals to white patrons when negotiating racial inequities—began to view labor unions, collective solidarity, and grass-roots mobilization as important tools in the ongoing fight for first-class citizenship. The reasons for the shift from a one-on-one approach to a protest strategy grounded in making demands backed by collective action is a key theme of this book.

A major target of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the Employee Representation Plan (ERP), a company union. The Brotherhood’s labor rhetoric emphasized the handicap of working under a company union because there were too many Uncle Toms in the service with their slave psychology who bow and kowtow to the company officials.¹⁹ In the battle against the paternalism of the Pullman Company, the BSCP employed the legacy of slavery to depict the Pullman Company as callous and heartless as Nero, treating the Pullman porter like a slave. To make its point, BSCP used the idiom of manhood rights to describe the servile relations that prevailed. The porter has no manhood in the eyes of the company, according to BSCP. He could be addressed as George by some sixteen-year-old Whipper snapper messenger boy even though the porter might be four times the boy’s age. And if . . . he should assert his rights as a man, immediately he is branded as a rattled brain radical, and hounded and harassed out of the service.²⁰

But the idiom of manhood and manhood rights conveyed more than taking a stand against Pullman paternalism. Organizers drew upon the concept of manhood as it had developed in nineteenth-century conflicts over the meaning of suffrage and citizenship in African American history and built upon understandings of manhood carried forward through sacred as well as secular texts, such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recalled resistance in the nineteenth century when people strove singly and together as men . . . not as slaves. Referring to Frederick Douglass, one of the heroes cited often in Brotherhood organizing literature, Du Bois noted that "Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion and on no other terms."²¹

Manhood rights appealed to a broad audience. Many black Chicago clubwomen were drawn to the Brotherhood, for example, because they, too, employed the concept manhood rights, which they defined in universal, humanistic terms. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, internationally renowned antilynching activist, was among them. Wells-Barnett initiated her antilynching crusade after a thorough investigation led her to conclude that the increase in lynching in the late nineteenth century was a deliberate response to black economic gains and political potential. When black men were accused of rape against white women, the charge was often a subterfuge, suggesting that lynching was punishment for the crime of black progress, viewed as a move toward social equality.²² It was within the context of Wells-Barnett’s antilynching campaign that she, and several other women, organized the first civic club among black women in Chicago, the Ida B. Wells Club, fusing race and gender issues.²³ While many clubwomen inextricably linked the interests of black womenhood and race progress—and believed, as Deborah Gray White argues, that solutions to the race problem began and ended with black women—there was a price to pay in terms of black feminism.²⁴ Black clubwomen were instrumental in advancing citizenship interests of African Americans through their alliance with the Brotherhood, but there were indications that female assertiveness sometimes created tensions between male organizers and the clubwomen network.²⁵ Nevertheless, the concept of manhood rights connected the Brotherhood and clubwomen who defined their gender interests mainly in racial terms as they worked with black men to improve the place of black Americans.²⁶ During the 1920s and 1930s, the larger problem—claiming rights of first-class citizenship—usually overshadowed other issues.

The Brotherhood pitched its campaign as a struggle not just over bread-and-butter issues, but for larger claims to status as first-class Americans. This was, they insisted, the unfinished task of emancipation.²⁷ The narrative that follows chronicles the BSCP’s attempt to use a labor-based movement as a tool for shaping a protest strategy that sought civil and economic rights. To explore the intersection of the BSCP’s union movement and the culture of protest politics, the study probes the evolving relationship between the BSCP and the black community in order to understand influences each had on the other. Efforts undertaken by the BSCP in its Citizens’ Committee and through its labor conferences to educate the community and win the hearts and minds of a critical mass of the black middle class move the narrative forward through the first several chapters. The BSCP developed these entities to connect its movement for workplace rights with the interests of African Americans in general and to counter the troubled history between unions and black workers as well as the thousands of dollars the Pullman Company poured into black neighborhoods to influence the press, ministers, and politicians. Because studies of the BSCP have been institutional in design and national in scope, these networks have received little attention from scholars. Yet the networks are the connective tissue between the porters’ union and the politics of the black community. As members of the BSCP protest networks mobilized black Chicagoans around the unfinished task of emancipation, they broke down resistance to organized labor even as they expanded the boundaries of citizenship to include equal economic opportunity. Between 1936 and 1940, the BSCP protest network gained a platform at the national level when it fused Brotherhood activities with those of the National Negro Congress organizing around a labor-oriented approach to civil rights.

While not an institutional study, this book emphasizes the influence that the tactics and agenda of the NAACP, led by Walter White, and the National Negro Congress (NNC), headed by John Davis and A. Philip Randolph, had over the direction of protest politics. Activities of key players in protest networks in Chicago are traced to these national organizations in order to connect micro-and macrolevel politics. Before the 1920s, the majority of mainstream black leaders—but certainly not all—deferred to etiquette prescribed by the dominant culture when they made petitions or requests