Still, the porters' working conditions were in many ways, untenable. They were tip workers. Porters hardly ever slept, and when they did, it was sometimes sitting up, in smoking cars.
And passengers often didn't call the porters by their names. They called them George, after George Pullman. "It was just a fancy way of calling you a boy," according to David A. Peterson, executive director of the National A. Philip Pullman Porter Museum.
When this happened to him,Gaines told the Tribune he would reply, "My name is Benjamin Franklin Gaines. There's no George anywhere."
Having been excluded from the American Railway Union, the porters formed their own union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925, about three decades after the factory workers' strike. A dozen years later, they would become the first black union to receive a collective bargaining agreement with a major U.S. corporation -- the Pullman Company.
--RoadDog
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