International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Pullman Porters.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was founded in Harlem in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph, Ashley L. Totten, W.H. Des Verney, and Roy Lancaster. Those attending the meeting called for recognition of the BSCP and the end of Pullman's Employee Representation Plan, a company union. It was not until 1936 that the BSCP recieved an international charter from the AFL. A year later, the union took advantage of the apparatus of the new National Labor Relations Board and signed its first contract with the Pullman Company. This contract called for a 240-hour work month, a wage hike amounting to $1.25 million, job security, and union representation.

Philip Randolph, as the AFL's resident black spokesman, called for an end to segregation of all AFL unions. BSCP members were instrumental to the civil rights movement. Randolph's national prominence grew when he threatened to bring 100,000 blacks to Washington, D.C. in 1941 to protest segregation in the defense industries. This threat compelled Roosevelt to issue an executive order for the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1947, Randolph again threatened a national campaign of civil disobedience, which greatly influenced Truman's executive order ending discrimination in the military. Randolph, the BPSCU, the National Negro Labor Council, and many other civil rights and labor organizations were essential to the organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other expressions of the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.

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