North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880-1920

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2001 by Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu

African Canadians hoped for due process and "equal justice between the classes" but knew that they would only be attained through political mobilization. Peter Evander McKerrow, a West Indian sailor turned powerful black Haligonian businessman, maintained that since Reconstruction African Americans enjoyed certain citizenship rights still denied to blacks in the Maritimes. "The United States with her faults ... has done much for the elevation of the colored races. She has given to the race professors in colleges, senators, engineers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics of every description. Sad and sorry are we to say that is more than we can boast of here in Nova Scotia."

For Reverend Robinson, the solution to black railwaymen's problems was a simple one. He insisted that if "the Negro porters and the race [were] as strongly organized into labour protective unions, etc., like their white brothers, the ICR would not have succeeded so well and peaceably in displacing their colored labour and substituting white in their stead." [42] Without unionization, black railwaymen in Canada would never enjoy true job security and would continually be forced into unemployment or positions "at starvation wages," held Robinson. [43] He berated the Canadian government and ICR managers for subjecting black men and their families to a life of poverty and degradation. "For over 250 years, this race served in bondage, suffering the most poignant sensations of shame, immorality, demoralization and degradation. Its men have been victimized, and they are still victimized, proscribed against and imposed upon by the dominant race both in the United States and here in Canada." Reverend Robinson warned a gainst such white supremacist practices as violations of African Canadians' "civil rights [and] the human right to gain an honest livelihood for themselves and their families." [44]

Black Haligonians called immediate attention to Jim Crow in railway employment policy by notifying the national press. [45] "Have No Use For Them -- Coloured Men on the Intercolonial Railway All Fired," exclaimed the Tory newspaper Chatham Planet. The Ontario newspaper accused the Liberal government of betraying its African Canadian constituents. "Liberal leaders at Ottawa seem to have completely lost their heads. ... While Premier Laurier speaks in the most flattering manner of the African race, his officials strike them down in a most brutal way, no complaint, no investigation -- just kick them out." [46]

Blacks in the Maritimes also contacted their federal members of Parliament Benjamin Russell and future Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden. Reverend Robinson emphasized that one thousand African Canadian voters in the Maritimes, "a sufficient number to give them the balance of power" would "get organized ... so that their voices and vote would be respected." [47] Conservative Parliament members took Robinson's warning to heart and laid the case of "Coloured Intercolonial Porters" before the House of Commons. [48] George Foster, the member from New Brunswick, inquired whether newspaper reports that "all the porters on the Pullman cars had been dismissed from the service of the Intercolonial" were indeed true. If so, Foster demanded that the Minister of Railways and Canals explain "whether they were dismissed for cause or whether the hon. gentleman is drawing the colour line in that service." [49]