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Passage 18
When A. Philip Randolph assumed the leadership of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he began a ten-year
battle to win recognition from the Pullman Company, the
largest private employer of Black people in the United
(5) States and the company that controlled the railroad
industry’s sleeping car and parlor service. In 1935 the
Brotherhood became the first Black union recognized by a
major corporation. Randolph’s efforts in the battle helped
transform the attitude of Black workers toward unions and
(10) toward themselves as an identifiable group; eventually,
Randolph helped to weaken organized labor’s antagonism
toward Black workers.
In the Pullman contest Randolph faced formidable
obstacles. The first was Black workers’ understandable
( 15) skepticism toward unions, which had historically barred
Black workers from membership. An additional obstacle
was the union that Pullman itself had formed, which
weakened support among Black workers for an
independent entity.
(20) The Brotherhood possessed a number of advantages,
however, including Randolph’s own tactical abilities. In
1928 he took the bold step of threatening a strike against
Pullman. Such a threat, on a national scale, under Black
leadership, helped replace the stereotype of the Black
(25)worker as servant with the image of the Black worker as
wage earner. In addition, the porters’ very isolation aided
the Brotherhood. Porters were scattered throughout the
country, sleeping in dormitories in Black communities;
their segregated life protected the union’s internal
(30) communications from interception. That the porters were a
homogeneous group working for a single employer with
single labor policy, thus sharing the same grievances from
city to city, also strengthened the Brotherhood and encour-
aged racial identity and solidarity as well. But it was only
(35) in the early 1930’s that federal legislation prohibiting a
company from maintaining its own unions with company
money eventually allowed the Brotherhood to become
recognized as the porters’ representative.
Not content with this triumph, Randolph brought the
(40)Brotherhood into the American Federation of Labor, where
it became the equal of the Federation’s 105 other unions.
He reasoned that as a member union, the Brotherhood
would be in a better position to exert pressure on member
unions that practiced race restrictions. Such restrictions
were eventually found unconstitutional in 1944. | 
