CHICAGO, Aug. 26 (UPI) -- Seventy-eight years after the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chicago's A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is waiting for its train to come in.
The train may be late but it looks like it will arrive.
The small museum, located in a remodeled three-story townhouse in the historic Pullman District on the far South Side, marked its anniversary Aug. 24 with its seventh annual "Honoring The Brotherhood" weekend celebration.
The event honors the unique contributions of the Pullman porters to the U.S. labor movement and the American struggle for civil rights.
Lyn Hughes, founder of the privately funded museum, this week announced plans, with help from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, to commission a monument to labor and Randolph on the museum grounds and buy a vintage Pullman sleeping car to expand the museum.
"In keeping with our mission of celebrating African-American contributions to labor, the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is organizing a national initiative to create a monument memorializing these heroic contributions," she said. "This is something that is long overdue."
The rail car would be "living history" to keep their stories from being lost.
"This is a project we are honored to give our full support," said Richard Womack, special assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
In light of the 40th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington on Aug. 28, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, organized labor is planning a tribute to Randolph, a labor giant, civil rights leader and an architect of the march.
Asa Philip Randolph first planned a march on Washington in 1941 to protest discriminatory government hiring practices that excluded blacks from federal jobs and contracts. That march would have focused on jobs but President Franklin Roosevelt circumvented it in June, six months before Pearl Harbor, by signing Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in the federal government and defense industry hiring.
Twenty-two years later, more than 250,000 people assembled peacefully at the Lincoln Memorial -- 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation -- for the 1963 March for Freedom and Jobs, a watershed event that led to a flood of future marches on Washington by grass-roots groups of all political persuasions to present their grievances to government.
By 1963, the 74-year-old Randolph was an elder statesman for black Americans. The organizational abilities of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters sowed the seeds for the modern civil rights movement and eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Randolph, a polished and dignified man known as the "Gentle Warrior," also helped convince President Harry S. Truman to end racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces in 1948 and in 1966 he called for spending $185 billion over a decade to fight poverty in the United States.
"Dr. King had emerged as the symbol, as the undisputed leader, because he had the ability and capacity to bring more people together. But it was A. Philip Randolph that had the capacity to hold us together," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in an interview on C-SPAN, which broadcast more than five hours of programming Saturday of speeches at a rally commemorating the 40th anniversary of the march.
Lewis, 63, the only surviving speaker of six major national civil rights leaders who spoke that day, said had Randolph "been born in another country, on another continent, maybe of another race he probably would have been king, prime minister or president. This was an unbelievable human being. He was just a good, decent man. He wanted to help all people, especially working people, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Native Americas."
On that day, Randolph appealed to a then-23-year-old Lewis to tone down the fiery rhetoric in his speech and drop a reference to people marching through the South like Gen. William Sherman "pursuing our own scorched-earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground -- nonviolently." Lewis took his advice.
"It's appropriate that this union, the Machinists union, be a part of the celebration for this project," said IAM International President R. Thomas Buffenbarger at the Pullman museum. "I like the idea of bringing a (rail) car onto this lot.
"This union (IAM) was founded 115 years ago this year by 19 railroad machinists in a hole in the ground, a railroad pit, in Atlanta, Ga., and they set out their goals very quickly in the depths of that pit. They had to hide to form a union in those years, but the light they kindled in that dark hole -- it was for equality, it was for justice, it was for a better life for people who toiled in the No. 1 mode of transportation in 1888, the rails.
"It's one of the earliest rail unions and it has a long proud history of standing with all the unions that made up the rail industry and gave birth to the prosperity that this country has been built on.
"It's rooted in railroads, be it the porters in Pullman cars, be it the maintenance of way, be it the railroad machinists, be it the locomotive engineer or the fireman, or the oiler. All played a role in building this great country and we have never lost sight that our job is not done."
The Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters was founded Aug. 25, 1925, and became the first black labor organization to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor. The brotherhood waged a successful 12-year fight to win a contract with the Pullman Company, becoming formal bargaining agent for the porters in 1937. The union represented tens of thousands of African-American men employed as porters and women employed as maids on Pullman Company sleeping cars leased to and operated by U.S. railroads.
"The AFL would set up Jim Crow locals that would just attach themselves to the regular locals. Or they set up what they called federated locals, that were not real locals, because they didn't allow African-Americans or Chicanos," said Ruth Needleman, professor of labor studies at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Ind.
Needleman, author of "Black Freedom Fighters in Steel," (Cornell University Press) established a special college degree program for steelworkers called Swingshift College.
"African-Americans had to organize separately because they had to overcome the enormous suspicion that existed among black workers of the unions based on the record of the AFL," she said. "The AFL never organized black workers and if they got their support in a strike they would turn around and exclude them from jobs and promotions."
Needleman said the Pullman Porters Museum was important "because A. Philip Randolph and the sleeping car porters in many ways opened the door to the struggle for Democratic unionism in this country.
"The unions before A. Philip Randolph didn't represent workers. They represented white male skilled workers and what he did within the AFL was break open that whole myth about who are workers and who are not."
Randolph, who was publisher of a Harlem-based magazine, The Messenger, was asked by porters to help them organize a union.
The powerful Pullman corporation attacked Randolph as a "Bolshevik" and a hustler, recruited strikebreakers and thugs to attack activists, and hired private police to undermine the union during the Depression. Despite threats, beatings and firings, Randolph rallied the union to prove "black men are able to measure up." The Brotherhood survived and lived up to its motto: "Stands for Service not Servitude."
This all occurred in an era before jet planes and superhighways, when cross-country travel took weeks and days, not hours and traveling in style and comfort meant riding in a Pullman rail car. Industrialist George Pullman initially used African-Americans exclusively as porters and the newly freed slaves served as kind of personal valets to the mostly white traveling public.
"He went South and recruited the recently freed slaves," said Hughes. "Well, of course, they thought it was wonderful because they had been slaves. They had not been paid. And so they took the job and worked it gratefully until about 1920."
In 1920, there were 20,224 Pullman porters.
They were hailed as international ambassadors of hospitality for their diligence, skill and organization in the performance of their duties. Their reputation for service and attention to detail was impeccable. Many porters were well-educated and articulate, having attended historically black colleges and universities, and most made a lot more in tips than the Pullman Company paid in wages.
"George Pullman did not have any use for any kind of union," said Needleman. "This was a company town and if you so much as mentioned or breathed union, you lost your job. Back in the 1890s during the big Pullman strike when Eugene Debs came to town to help out, the whole town was set up so that you had beautiful houses on the central plaza. That was for the white big important people. Then you had row houses for the skilled workers and you had tenements, basically for the immigrant workers and then you had barracks at best for the black workers.
"You got paid in script and you had to buy everything here in Pullman and the only people who could drink in Pullman were the company executives.
"There was no alcohol allowed," she said. "Of course right across the street under the viaduct there were probably 50 saloons for every 10 workers.
"The Pullman porters really persisted like no other group within the railroad industry. Because the railroad brotherhoods only organized the skilled workers and Eugene Debs' efforts in 1892 and the 1890s to organize an industrial union in the railroads failed, really on the heels of the Pullman strike in 1894.
"Those Pullman porters never stopped organizing and part of what they had was a view of the world. They saw far beyond the small communities that they lived in in the South," said Needleman.
The Pullman job took them through the larger world and opened up the possibilities for a better life they seized. "Pullman porters play an incredible role in history," she said.
E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who was an officer in the NAACP, was instrumental in the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., that began when Rosa Parks, a seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man.
The union merged with the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen/Transportation Communications International Union in 1978 after Amtrak took over passenger rail service in the United States in 1971.
The U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative A. Philip Randolph stamp Feb. 3, 1989, as part of its Black Heritage USA series.
The efforts of blacks to form unions goes back to the 1840s and 1850s, pre-emancipation, when free African-Americans formed the American League of Colored Laborers.
Black waiters formed the Waiter Protective Association of New York in 1853 to bargain for better wages. The Association of Black Caulkers was founded in 1858 in Baltimore, to protect black workers from violence by immigrants who felt threatened by black employment.
The Colored National Labor Union held its first convention in 1869 in Washington and elected orator and former slave Frederick Douglas the first vice president.
Buffenbarger said IAM would do "our darnedest" to find a Pullman car for the museum. He said retired machinists throughout the United States operate railroad museums and clubs that restore old locomotives and railroad cars.
"We will issue a broadcast call 'help us out guys.' Where can we find a vintage Pullman that we can arrange to have moved to Chicago and put on the grounds of this worthy museum.
"If one exists and its for sale -- that's the critical part -- we'll work hard to try to make it happen," he told United Press International.
"If honoring the Pullman Porters, if honoring A. Philip Randolph in such a way as to call attention to the contribution that working men and women of all colors, creeds, status in life have done to make this a better country then it's a worthwhile project and we'll look forward to working with you in the future on this," said Buffenbarger.
IAM International Vice President Alex Bay recognized two veteran Pullman porters who were honored on the dais and said it was vital to pass on the history.
"So many of our children don't know very much about history -- period," said Bay. "Much less about what their parents and grandparents did in the labor movement.
"Labor really has no color barriers," he said. "It used to have and it shouldn't have had, and it doesn't have today and should never have again. When we think of labor we should never think about who the people are, or what color they are. It's just that we're all under one brotherhood and we're there for the same purpose -- to make a better life for all those who work for a living and to make it a better place for our children to grow up in, and safer communities and have a good job so we can elevate ourselves and do the things that families need to do."
There is a national registry of 3,000 black railroad employees on the museum's Web site, aphiliprandolphmuseum.org. The museum would like more living railroad workers to document the stories of porters, waiters and others for future researchers.
George Moody, 91, said he saw a lot a change during his 44-year career as a Pullman Porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad and Northern, North Coast Limited.
"I started at 27 on the chair car coach," he said. "In 1941 (a Pullman Porter) was a pretty good job to have."
Moody, a father of five, said Randolph was always talking about a march on Washington decades before the turbulent 1960s.
