Museum chronicles African-American labor movement

“When I started work, we only got paid for A.M. time, no P.M. time,” an elderly, bespectacled gentleman recounts in an oral history of Pullman porters that is among historical treasures within a building on the South Side considered by many a hidden jewel.

“Mostly, we made money from tips,” adds another. “If you ran South, you didn’t make much tips.”

Both were members of the nation’s first chartered African-American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized in 1925 by civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to take on America’s powerful Pullman Rail Car Co. Battling the long hours and scant pay for attendants on Pullman’s luxury sleeping cars, the group would not achieve recognition until Aug. 25, 1937. But in the process, Pullman porters would open the door to the ensuing civil rights movement.

Many of the train waiters and porters interviewed by the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum — host to one of the nation’s largest collection of photos, family artifacts and personal memorabilia from the African-American labor movement — have long gone to their rest.

“There might be five of them I know of that are still living,” says museum founder Lyn Hughes.

“I’ve been in contact with maybe 100 of them over the years. But we’ve lost so many. Mr. Eugene Bowser, he died last month at age 94. I think he was the last one here in Chicago.”

In transition also is the museum Hughes founded in 1995 with her divorce settlement and a state grant of $188,000. At the corner of 104th & Maryland, it’s housed in one of the Historic Pullman District’s original rowhouses built in 1880 by rail car titan George Pullman.

Having carved the museum’s niche among national groups involved in the preservation of civil rights and African-American history — porters and their descendants nationwide coming forward to donate a majority of its collection — Hughes is stepping down.

She had started the museum after taking an official tour of Historic Pullman that mentioned no role of African Americans. “The first book I picked up about the plight of African-American railroad employees touched me in a way that literally changed my life’s direction,” she says.

Randolph and his union were responsible in 1941 for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of an order banning racial discrimination in government hiring in order to avoid a planned march on Washington. Though it was called off, that march would set the framework for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington, with Randolph as a leader and his union a major funder.

Hughes later chronicled the stories of thousands of porters and their descendants in a national registry that became the noted, “An Anthology of Respect.” In it, families tell of inhumane treatment of the porters before the union won them shorter hours and better wages and treatment. “These jobs were considered menial, but these men turned it into a position of stature,” she says. “I wound up creating a unique institution that helped spark renewed interest in their movement. But it’s time for a young person to step in and carry the legacy to the next level.”

Being installed as the new president at a Feb. 25th fund-raiser is a young man who grew up in Pullman. As a teen, David Peterson, now 30, lost two of his friends to violence there, and came home to work with the community’s youth after graduating from Florida A&M University in 2007.

He volunteered at the museum during high school and summers home from college, and has worked there since 2009 while completing his master’s degree at DePaul University. And at the helm, he’s hit the ground running, with a youth engagement program “where hip-hop meets history.”

“We have to keep coming up with more innovative ways to tell the story of the porters to my generation,” says Peterson. “The museum is important because it tells our youth a story rarely told in our history, that being a regular person of integrity and respect can get you the same legacy being a superstar can get you. It also shows them that being in the service industry is not something that should be looked down on, that there was a time it was a badge of honor.”

The museum also will honor two of today’s union titans, Billy Hunter of the National Basketball Players Association and William McNary of USAction, the nation’s largest coalition of grassroots groups advocating social and racial justice, at the Feb. 25th event.

BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA Staff Reporter mihejirika@suntimes.com February 16, 2012