Vendor A. Allen: Pullman Porters and the Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. Born a slave, she escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

I remember when I first heard of Ms. Tubman and the Underground Railroad, one of the first things that came to my mind was, a train.

But the train didn’t come into play until the Pullman porters, in my opinion.

The reason I see the Pullman porters as part of the Underground Railroad is they smuggled the Chicago Defender newspaper onto trains and left them in barber shops and beauty shops in towns in the South, letting Blacks know about opportunities in the North during World War I, which fueled the Great Migration. Then, the porters unionized under A. Philip Randolph into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), which won a collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company in 1937. The Pullman Company was the largest employer of African Americans at the time and the collective bargaining agreement was the first by an African American union with a major U.S. corporation.

Even today, the Underground Railroad continues to survive, and thrive, in one way or another. It may not be smuggling slaves to the North, or news to the South, but it is standing in solidarity, claiming that Black Lives Matter. We’ve come a long way by way of the Underground Railroad.