Dellums, Cottrell Lawrence (1900–1989)

Cottrell Lawrence (C. L.) Dellums was born in 1900 in Corsicana, Texas. His father was born in slavery, just two and a half months before “Juneteenth” (June 19, 1865), the date emancipation belatedly came to Texas.

As a self-taught young man, Dellums was determined to become a lawyer, stating, “I don't plan to wear these overalls for the rest of my life.” He was articulate, eloquent, and knowledgeable. However, in the 1920s, African Americans had few options for a decent job. In January of 1924, Dellums began work as a porter with the Pullman Company's sleeping cars for $2.00 a day, plus tips. The company provided [Page 200]sleeping cars for all long-distance trains and was the country's first large hotel chain.

In some ways, Pullman porters represented higher status. Porters were admired by family and friends for taking on the work, for the travel the work afforded them (instead of being rooted in one place), and for the money they earned, which provided families a chance to be self-sufficient. They were respected even in terms of their attire: Porters donned professional uniforms as opposed to laborers' denims. During this time, all of the porters were black, and the bosses were white. The hours were long, there was no overtime, and the Pullman Company reminded the porters of their social class with the enforcement of arbitrary rules.

C. L. Dellums did not have a long career with the company, though the union was the focus of much of his life. He became one of the founding officers of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), along with A. Phillip Randolph, BSCP's first president. Dellums helped create and organize the Pullman porters' labor union in August of 1925. The BSCP did not have a very auspicious beginning; no more than half the porters joined the movement at its inception. In October of 1927, the company fired Dellums for his union-raising activities, and in order to make a living after losing his job, he ran a billiard parlor that became one of the centers of west Oakland social life.

The BSCP was created as a union for Pullman porters and maids, and was the first African American labor organization to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor. Dellums helped organize the union at a time when railroad workers constituted approximately one third of all documented African American wage earners. As such, the BSCP became a powerful, if not lone, advocate for the black workers it represented.

As part of the first campaign, the BSCP demanded improved wages and better working conditions. On September 7, 1927, the brotherhood filed a case with the Interstate Commerce Commission, hoping to get an investigation of the Pullman Company in order to shed light upon the plight of its union members. The BSCP finally gained official recognition a decade later, in 1937, when the union finally forced the Pullman Company to negotiate a labor contract for its representative members. Through the union's efforts in those first years, African Americans acquired control of Pullman porters' and dining car workers' positions throughout the railroad system. These positions were some of the best available and most sought after jobs for black working men. Dellums was elected vice president of the union in 1929 and became its president in 1966, when he succeeded Randolph—though by then the heyday of the Pullman cars was already past.

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