Interview with E.D. Nixon, July 14, 1981

Mr. Nixon posted bail for Rosa Parks after she was arrested for sitting in a “White” seat on a Montgomery bus.  He was very active in the bus boycott that followed.

[W]hen I got home, before I got off the train, the superintendent there told me, “I understand you attended the meeting of the Brotherhood yesterday in St. Louis.” I said, “Yes I did.” So he says, “I’ll tell you right now, we’re not going to have any of our porters attending the Brotherhood meeting.” I says, “Well, if somebody told you I attended the meeting there, maybe they told you also that I joined yesterday.” And before he could answer me, I said, “Of course, before I joined I thought about what lawyer I wanted to handle my case if you started to mess with my job. And that’s what I’m going to do—I’m going to drag anybody into court that messes with my job.” And I didn’t even know a lawyer’s name at that time. But I bluffed him out so that he didn’t bother me, and from then on I was a strong supporter of A. Philip Randolph.

Interview with Fred Fair, March 30, 1983

Mr. Fair had served as porter on President Roosevelt’s Pullman car.

When he [Randolph] first started, there wasn’t much organizing you could do, above the boards. You had to sneak around homes and everywhere else and organize. We had men fired. Some of them got back, some of them didn’t after the agreement was signed. Everybody didn’t go [along with the union], because they were afraid of losing the job they had, you know, because so many of them had lost their jobs around the country.

Interview with Rosina Tucker, June 19, 1981

I got involved—I could not be involved if my husband was not a porter. You see, this is an organization for the porters, and I became involved as a member of the auxiliary. But before we had an international auxiliary, we had little clubs—like councils, we called them. And in that way all over the country, these councils would help the men to raise money and so forth. And I organized the council here in this very house, very early in the movement, and I was made president.

So, we worked along, my group. We did teas, we did little dances and so forth. And sent it to New York to help them. And other auxiliaries, I suppose, did the same. That’s why I say that the women were the ones who were the backbone, in that they furnished the money and encouragement to the officials. Now, we had a meeting at a certain home once, and the company found out that we had this meeting.  So they called the husband in, the porter in, and asked him about it. The porter was able to show by his time sheet that he was out of town. But his wife held the meeting!

The Women’s Auxiliary got started almost the same time as the Brotherhood. We had these small groups of women in every city.

Interview with William Harrington, July 16, 1982

Before 1936, your superintendent would put a yes-man on a run and nobody could bump him. Your seniority was nothing, and that’s the way it was up until 1936. We got the first agreement with the Pullman Company. Of course, we didn’t get that until Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he first came in, he passed a law that we could form a union without interference from your employer. And that’s when you could legally join a union without being fired or being laid off. Of course, the union was formed before that time, but you had to slip to meetings, and it was something like an underground movement, see? Because when the Pullman Company found out you attended a union meeting, you were probably laid off. He tell you to go home until he sent for you. And you may be home a week, or two weeks, but they would punish you, hearing that you attended union meetings.

When that law was passed, it knocked all the stool pigeons out, what we call stool pigeons, that run to the superintendent, carrying news to the superintendent. Some men would cut your throat to make good with the superintendent. In 1927, we were afraid to join. I didn’t join until 1929.

Interview with C.L. Dellums, November 13, 1980

Mr. Dellums was one of the founding members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and was fired for his involvement in the union.

We were a handful of Negroes. Had nothing: no money, no experience in this. I used to say that all we had was what God gave the lizard.

We succeeded after twelve long, bitter, expensive years. Somewhere between five hundred and one thousand men were discharged from the Pullman Company as a result of their union activities or their open support of the union. All the money we could take and scrape was put in that struggle. . . .

Source: Santino, Jack.  Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.