100 Years of Sleeping Car Porters

The Association for African American Life and History celebrates the theme “African Americans and Labor” as part of its 2025 Black History Month observations, and in commemoration of that theme the Library’s Art Tatum Resource Center is pleased to curate an array of titles that explore labor struggles in new, complicated, and distinct ways.

For example, 100 years ago on Aug. 25, 1925 in New York City, a notable labor union was created by the brilliant A. Philip Randolph, a “beautiful tactician and a radical activist” who came to be known as the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was one of the first and largest labor unions founded exclusively for African Americans, and the first to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). As the name suggests, Sleeping Car Porters delivered high-quality work on the railroad by way of “luxury sleeping rail cars”—signature comforts that became part of their sophisticated style, including shoe polishing, meal preparation, social amenities, and lodge housekeeping. Over the course of several historical eras, Pullman Porters provided comfort and an overall safer haven for passengers which included many renowned musicians.

In solidarity with other contemporary labor unions, Brotherhood members benefited from “higher wages per month and fewer hours in the work month.” Those benefit, in addition to other early victories under Randolph’s leadership, helped pave the way for the “united efforts of Black worker and labor movements during the Civil Rights Movement.”

Moreover, the union helped to expand the Black press: Sleeping Car Porters are credited for distributing to the communities on their routes numerous historical newspapers, including The Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Randolph himself was a founder of The Messenger, a Black press socialist magazine created to bolster the labor movement.

Learn more about the history of the Brotherhood with these great finds in the Toledo Lucas County Public Library’s holdings. Other resources can be found in the Art Tatum African American Resource Center at the Kent Branch Library and the Labor History collection in the Main Library’s Local History department.