BLACK LEADERSHIP, LEGACY AND THE SLEEPING CAR PORTERS

In 2025, Black History Month falls on the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the United States. It was the beginning of a 10-year organizing drive by Asa Philip Randolph that finally resulted in the Brotherhood’s certification, that brought the union movement into millions of American households and that established Randolph as the “father of the Civil Rights Movement.”

As we celebrate this crucial landmark in the history of American labour rights and civil rights, we also take the opportunity to reflect on Canada’s Black Sleeping Car Porters’ labour movement. Canadian labour activists had a pioneering part in this history that predates Randolph and made its own contributions to the broader struggle for racial equity, rights and freedoms. Here, we’ll look at its pivotal figures, their enduring legacy and the inspiration they can provide future generations.


THE HISTORY OF CANADA’S BLACK SLEEPING CAR PORTERS

Click here to see an overview of the history of Sleeping Car Porters’ union movements in Canada.

Sleeping car porters fulfilled a wide range of crucial roles at the height of North American rail travel. They managed the passenger berths aboard trains — setting them up for the evening and converting them back to seats each morning — greeted passengers and stowed baggage, brushed coats and hats and shone shoes. They also babysat children, looked after sick children and adults, dealt with intoxicated passengers and kept an eye out for troublemakers.

As porter Herb Carvery put it: “We were babysitters, not only for little kids but for adults.” Catering to the every need of passengers was hard and thankless work, and the porters doing it faced racism and discrimination in the process. They weren’t allowed to sit with the passengers, weren’t afforded any real sleeping arrangements apart from a single uncomfortable chair — despite working trips that might last more than three days — and weren’t permitted to eat in the dining car except in the off hours late at night and early in the morning.

It was, unfortunately, the only work many Black men of the time could find, since their job opportunities were highly limited. The ranks of the sleeping car porters included Black men from all over Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and beyond. The work was poorly paid and precarious, which combined with the poor conditions would make it necessary for porters to seek more just terms of employment by unionizing.


STANLEY G. GRIZZLE: A MAJOR FIGURE IN THE BLACK SLEEPING CAR PORTERS’ UNION MOVEMENT

Click here to read more about Stanley G. Grizzle.

The first Black railway workers’ union was founded not in the United States, but in Winnipeg. The Order of Black Sleeping Car Porters was founded in 1917 by John Arthur Robinson and three colleagues. By 1939, they acquired membership in the American Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. They had founded divisions in Toronto and Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver by 1942, and finally signed a collective bargaining agreement with CP Rail in 1945.

One of the most well-known leaders in the Canadian BCSP was Stanley G. Grizzle, who was active in advocating and negotiating better working conditions for porters from the early Forties. Elected president of the Toronto CPR division of the BSCP in 1946, he was a member of the Joint Labour Committee to Combat Racial Intolerance in the early 1950s and was instrumental in the push for anti-discriminatory legislation. He was a famous face and voice of the cause on television and radio, a commitment that carried forward into his subsequent career at the Ontario Labour Board and as Canada’s first Black citizenship court judge.


INPSIRATION AND THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER

Stanley Grizzle was part of the inspiration for the Giller Prize-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter.

The legacy of the Black Sleeping Car Porters has lived on to influence later generations. Suzette Mayr became the first Black Canadian woman, and the first 2SLGBTQIA+ writer, to win the Giller Prize in 2022 for her acclaimed novel The Sleeping Car Porter.

As the Giller Prize jury put it:

“Suzette Mayr brings to life . . . a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly one hundred years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate –and eerily contemporary.”

We’ll be discovering this wonderful novel at UFCW Local 401 during Black History Month, and we urge everyone who can to do the same as a fun and enlightening way of marking this important month and its subject matter.


FROM THE ALBERTA LABOUR HISTORY INSTITUTE: AN INTERVIEW WITH HAZEL PROCTOR

Daughter of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President Bert Proctor, Hazel Proctor had an extensive singing career and was active in social justice work against discrimination and systemic racism as the leader of the Alberta Association for the Advancement of Colored People (AAACP).

Click here to watch a 2001 interview with Hazel at the Alberta Labour History Institute’s website!


FIND MORE INFORMATION

Follows these links to learn more about the history of the Black Sleeping Car Porters:

From all of us at UFCW Local 401, Happy Black History Month!