Talk:Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 September 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bousqi.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 16:19, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Organization, exclusions & citations
Hello. The article needs several revisions. I have only contributed to a small portion of what ought to be changed - I am curious to know the opinions of others. First, the organization and content of the segment,'Organizing the Union,' much of what the user 'Bentmite' has previously mentioned on this page ought to be considered further. Throughout the article, much of the text lacks citations - which is problematic as information may be riddled with opinion and have the potential to mislead readers. I have begun a small section on the role of women in the organization and growth of the union. It remains unfinished and perhaps ought to be expanded in the following ways: the inclusion of notable female leaders, the day to day experiences of women who fundraised and organized, the role that women played in expanding the union and the development of culture that these women contributed to in their work. Wikieditah162 (talk) 02:34, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

conductor
This article describes a conductor as a job reserved for whites. That was written in the context of the 1920's. What a sad commentary it is that our conductor (transportation) article, written 80 years later, still features a picture of a white man performing that job. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:23, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Copyvio
Prince Par—thanks for not writing over the text of the article on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. But the text you have added still presents a problem, since it is lifted almost verbatim from a February 1, 2001 article by Pia Sarkar for the San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/01/MN140578.DTL

This sort of copyright violation is taken very seriously by Wikipedia editors; I know because I had an article deleted when it appeared that it was taken from a newspaper article (as it turns out, it was the other way around; they passed off the Wikipedia article as their own). I have therefore deleted the addition you made, because it puts the entire article in jeopardy.

The addition is also not suitable for this article. It repeats, in a format suitable for a newspaper article but not an encyclopedia entry, some of the facts already provided in the main part of the article. I have kept the part that is new, the existence of a museum devoted to Randolph and the Union in Chicago. Italo Svevo 02:59, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Cultural and social impact of Pullman porters missing
Although this article touches on the impact of the relatively high pay of porters (compared to other African-Americans at that time), most of the section talks about what a crappy job it was. Compared to what?

A larger question is the absence from this article of any discussion of the role of the Pullman porters in establishing a national African-American constituency. The porters carried newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American into every part of the country, notably the South, building nationwide awareness of Northern action on racial justice.

Furthermore, the porters also carried and sold "race music", mostly Southern black artists on northern record labels, at every stop, thus building up the prestige and profit of recording native African-American music, and, paradoxically, bringing blues and jazz from Chicago back down the Mississippi river where the whole thing started.

I hadn't looked at this page in a while, but previous versions of this article have taken this broader viewpoint and somehow this important, meaningful historical information is no longer here.

PS -- I probably wrote some of that myself. It's possible some idiot thought it was original research. Ortolan88 (talk) 23:10, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

This entry contains errors/places for improvement, especially in the later history of the union. I am not editing the entry because of the COI policy. During the period of C. L. Dellums' presidency and for the period of Randolph's presidency after Milton Webster died in 1965, Theodore D. McNeal of St. Louis also played an important role in leading the BSCP. (McNeal was a pioneering Missouri public figure as well.) The BSCP ceased to exist as a stand-alone union when it merged with BRAC in 1976; it had fewer than 1,000 members. It then became part of BRAC's Allied Services Division and remained so until the creation of the Amtrak Division of BRAC at BRAC's 1983 convention. Leroy Shackelford, a protege of Milton Webster, headed the Amtrak on-board workers unit within those parts of BRAC until he was succeeded in 1985 by Greg LeRoy, also of Chicago and a white who began working as a sleeping car service attendant for Amtrak in 1974; he served four years as chairman of what was then BRAC District 2501.  Greg LeRoy (talk) 04:58, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Organizing the Union Needs Work
"In addition, the economic separation, deprivation, and marginalization of the black community forced by Jim Crow and the doctrine of advancement through self-reliance preached by Booker T. Washington led many black leaders to look with distrust on joining with whites on issues of common concern — and often denied that blacks and whites had any common interests at all."

At first, I thought this just needed better punctuation to separate the stated causes of black mistrust of alliances with white labor into Jim Crow law on one hand, and Washington's so-called self-reliance thesis on the other. But, now I think it needs to be rethought and rewritten.

As it is, the line argues that responsibility for blacks' distrust falls equally on discriminatory Southern laws and advocates of black self-determination.

But the exclusion of black people from the normative spheres of social, economic, and consumer life was (/is) a nationwide phenomenon. What about Northern and Western discrimination and segregation, and the fraught history of white unions excluding black workers or preventing black workers from rising above the worst positions? Or histories of northern industrialists using black workers as strike breakers, and white workers' violence against such 'scabs'? And the housing and lending discrimination that confined blacks to urban ghettos in northern cities? Those histories, and drastic inequalities, between even the worst-paid white wage workers and black wage workers were probably the larger engines of blacks' mistrust of white labor organizations, even when they had supposed "issues of common concern".

Also, this misrepresents Washington's thesis in "Up From Slavery" which is that blacks must first, historically, establish themselves economically AND become indispensable to the white-citizen-dominated business world--not as a permanently parallel nation apart, but as a group operating like the mass-immigrant groups of the 19th century/his time (germans, etc.) who came off the medieval European dirt farm and integrated with / rose to the status of average (white) citizenship over the course of 2-3 generations by building modern technical knowledge and skills, their own social and educational organizations, and/or their own businesses. Bentmite (talk) 19:57, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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