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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

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 were 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]