Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chicago Division, Selected Papers on Microfilm
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Scope and Contents
Largely intra-union correspondence with A. Philip Randolph and other national officers regarding local organizing efforts, grievances, rival unionism, and other matters of interest to the division. Originals in the Chicago Historical Society.
Dates
- 1925-1938
Language of Materials
Collection material in English
Conditions Governing Access
Access to the collections in the Kheel Center is restricted. Please contact a reference archivist for access to these materials.
Conditions Governing Use
This collection must be used in keeping with the Kheel Center Information Sheet and Procedures for Document Use.
Biographical / Historical
The International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids was the first African American labor union chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Pullman porters, dissatisfied with their treatment by the Chicago-based Pullman Company, sought the assistance of A. Philip Randolph and others in organizing their own union, founded in New York in 1925. The new union assigned Milton P. Webster to direct its organizing in Chicago, home to the largest number of Pullman's 15,000 porters.
As a black organization, not just a union, the Brotherhood was an important early component of the civil rights movement. Porters distributed the Chicago Defender after that black newspaper was banned from mail distribution in many southern states. The Pullman Company's recognition of the union in 1937 and the expansion of Brotherhood membership and activities slowly fractured segregation within the AFL.
In 1978, the decline of the railroad industry led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to merge with the much larger Brotherhood of Railway, Airline, Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express, and Station Employees.
The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago
Extent
0.44 cubic feet
Abstract
Largely intra-union correspondence with A. Philip Randolph and other national officers regarding local organizing efforts, grievances, rival unionism, and other matters of interest to the division. Originals in the Chicago Historical Society.
Quantity:
4 microfilm reels
Forms of Material:
Records (documents), microfilm.
General
- Contact Information:
- Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives Martin P. Catherwood Library 227 Ives Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-3183 kheel_center@cornell.edu http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/kheel-center
- Compiled by:
- Kheel Staff, May 19, 2014
- EAD encoding:
- Kheel Staff, March 13, 2019
- Title
- Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chicago Division, Selected Papers on Microfilm
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Compiled by Kheel Staff
- Date
- March 13, 2019
- Language of description
- Undetermined
- Script of description
- Code for undetermined script
Revision Statements
- 02/23/2024: This resource was modified by the ArchivesSpace Preprocessor developed by the Harvard Library (https://github.com/harvard-library/archivesspace-preprocessor)
Repository Details
Part of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives Repository
227 Ives Hall
Ithaca NY 14853