Museum and online registry preserve story of black railroad porters

Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2003 by Petrosino, Frankie J

In 1921, Wesley Watkins migrated from Mississippi to Chicago, where he worked as a railroad porter for 40 years. His nephew, Ron Watkins, remembers his uncle giving him his first electric train set.

"He was considered a patriarch and [was] very well respected," Watkins recalls. "All of us had a great reverence and respect for him because of the way : he carried himself."

Wesley Watkins was among more than 20,000 African American porters working on trains during the 1920s. Porters oversaw passenger comfort on the Pullman trains, which dominated rail travel at the time.

When Cincinnati native Lyn Hughes toured Chicago's Pullman District in 1990, she found the building that housed the headquarters of the Pullman Palace Car Co. vacant and dilapidated. The company had employed thousands of African American men as porters and waiters on its trains from 1868 to 1968, when it ceased operation.

In 1995, Hughes established the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago to show the great legacy of the Pullman porters, many of whom were recently freed slaves.

"Pullman wanted people of African descent to work in that capacity because ... they would not complain about their treatment or pay. They had no frame of reference about their worth," she says.

In 1925, the porters organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), which was led by A. Philip Randolph. The union protested poor working conditions and inadequate pay. On Aug. 25, 1937, the BSCP became the first Black labor union to secure a collectivebargaining agreement with a major U.S. corporation.

Many scholars credit the union with ushering in a new era in African American protest politics. In 1941, Randolph proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to protest job discrimination, prompting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in federal and defense hiring.

"It was the difference between making appeals to White benefactors and demanding rights," says Beth Tompkins Bates, a professor of African American history at Wayne State University and the author of Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945.

Shortly after opening the museum, Hughes created a traveling exhibit of Pullman history that is contracted to museums and private corporations. The exhibit, along with private donations, funds the museum, which receives no government support. In addition, Hughes recently announced plans to build a monument statue to Black laborers on the grounds of the Porter museum.

In 2001, Hughes established an online registry for descendants of porters. So far, 3,000 have registered their relatives. Hughes hopes to publish the first volume of porters' stories and photos in fall 2004.

To include your relative's story in the volume to be published in fall 2004, register by December at www.aphiliprandolphmuseum.org.

- Frankie J. Petrosino