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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.