FROM PULLMAN CARS TO FREEDOM TRAINS

My story begins in 1820 when a Baptist carpenter married a Presbyterian woman in upstate New York. For a few years they attended no church, teaching their children religious values on their own. Then they were attracted to the Universalist message of "God is Love" preached by the evangelist Timothy Eaton, and began attending the Universalist Church in Portland, New York. Thus their children, including George Mortimer Pullman, were raised Universalist.

In George's late teens, he and his father and two brothers were employed moving houses along the Erie Canal and he became familiar with comfortable accommodations for river travel. Later George would bring the same comfort to the railroads, eventually building an industrial career most noted for the Pullman sleeping cars, and leaving a reputation most noted for provoking the Pullman employee strike of 1894, led by Eugene Debs, later the Socialist candidate for President.

Pullman, like all people, was a mixture of good, bad, and the conditions of his times. The on-line Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography points out that he "applied religious teaching solely to interpersonal ethics, not to social issues." For example, "Pullman would neither allow labor unions nor listen to complaints nor negotiate with employees. He did, however, usually allow holdout workers to return to their jobs after failed strikes." Much as I, as a labor union activist, might criticize his anti-labor attitude and practices, his acceptance of employees who had gone on strike was better than most industrialists of his time.

Again from the Dictionary of UU Biography, "Shortly after the Civil War, Pullman had begun hiring African Americans as porters and waiters. Although he paid them a fraction of what he paid Whites, segregated them in menial jobs, and worked them harder than other workers, Pullman offered Blacks better jobs and working conditions than did anyone else at the time. As porters, Southern Black men escaped sharecropping and traveled around the country, where they learned new skills and found more opportunities. Their pay and tips held many Black families together when other work was prohibited to them." We could certainly pay due note to Pullman's discriminatory practices, but a step forward, as we learn from Edward Everett Hale, is still a step forward. I also think the train travel involved in the porter's job was invaluable, as it afforded Blacks the opportunity to compare conditions throughout the country, and also to show their ability to perform quality work with less supervision than the norm at the time.

On August 25, 1925, 28 years after the death of George Pullman, another step forward was taken by 500 porters who met in Harlem to launch another union organizing effort. To avoid the firing of their union leaders, they chose as their President a non-porter, Asa Philip Randolph. Randolph had had the good fortune to attend the only academic high school in all of Florida for African Americans. He had joined Eugene Debs's Socialist Party and had previous organizing experience, having been a leader in the Shakespearean Society of Harlem, besides an elevator operators union and a dock workers union. Within a year the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had enrolled 51% of all porters.

A setback occurred for the Brotherhood in 1928, when the National Mediation Board ruled that the Brotherhood would probably not be able to pull off a strike, and was therefore not a real union. This ruling was used by the American Federation of Labor to decline the Brotherhood's affiliation request. Nevertheless Randolph and the AFL arranged that individual locals of the Brotherhood could directly affiliate with the AFL. This step forward began the process of the essentially White labor movement interacting with and eventually accepting Black workers and Black leaders. Improvements in the labor relations laws enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed an election to be held among porters, in which the Brotherhood defeated the Association created by the company. On June 1, 1935 the Brotherhood was certified as a genuine union representing the porters; the AFL granted the Brotherhood a charter; Randolph went on to become a Vice-President of the AFL and was one of the negotiators who achieved union of the AFL and CIO.

In 1937 the Brotherhood signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman company. This was much more significant than just the signing of a union contract. There were now two main sets of organizations in which Black Americans could develop and demonstrate leadership abilities: the various Black churches and Black labor unions led by the Brotherhood. In 1941 Randolph's threat of a march on Washington, in conjunction with lobbying by White allies such as Fiorello La Guardia and Eleanor Roosevelt, led to a ban on discrimination by defense contractors and the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. When a "Freedom Train" was organized to celebrate America after the end of World War II, I believe these successes contributed to the decision that Blacks and Whites would be allowed to visit the train together wherever it stopped. (As a result, some southern towns, such as Birmingham and Memphis, refused the train.) Finally, in 1963 when a march on Washington was achieved, it was Randolph and his associate Bayard Rustin, who were the major organizing force, and Randolph was the titular head of the march. The Black religious leadership joined in, most notably with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

It is through these events that I see one way that trains have contributed to Unitarian Universalist values. I also see that we should not allow the need for a great leap, or the failings of potential allies, to keep us from taking each step forward that lies within our grasp.

Benediction

At the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph said "Let the nation know the meaning of our numbers. We are not a pressure group. We are not an organization. We are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution that is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights, for our white allies know that they are not free while we are not." Indeed, though the heavy burden of discrimination lay on our Black brothers and sisters, a White person was no more free to be a sleeping car porter than a Black person was to be a conductor. Go now and return again, in brotherhood and sisterhood.