Brotherhood of Sleepingcar Porters

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters it’s Affect on the Labor and Civil Rights Movement

Stephen D. Burston

HRMG 5000 Managing Human Resources

Prof. Mary P. Campbell

Webster University

8 October 2013

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a labor union organized by African American employees of the Pullman Company in August 1925 and led by A. Philip Randolph and Milton P. Webster. This paper will discuss the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) founders, the issues that caused its fight for organization and recognition, the Pullman Company, the American Federation of Labor and the affect on the labor movement and the affect on the civil rights movement.

First let’s examine the beginning of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and its leadership. The beginning there were three Pullman porters, considered exemplary representatives of the field, chose to take a risk against the odds. Ashley Totten, Roy Lancaster, and William Des Verney they decided the Pullman porters needed a union. There is nothing to be found on the background of Roy Lancaster, and William Des Verney. Ashley L. Totten was born in Frederiksted, St Croix on October 11 1884. As an adult in 1915 he departed for New York City, he served in the US Navy as a bugler on the USS Algonquin before he started working as a porter for the Pullman Company.

In the summer of 1925, New York’s black porters were persuaded that they needed a union. Something had to be done about the Pullman Company’s treatment of its black porters, and leaders were needed to take them into arenas beyond the reach of the company’s reprisals. Then a small group of porters held a number of secret meetings and worked out plans for founding a union. Their plans were formalized and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized in the Elks Hall in the Harlem section of New York City on August 25, 1925. Later, Asa Phillip Randolph was named general organizer of the union. Other officers were William H. Des...