Derailed

 

The Women’s Auxiliary was primarily made up of the wives and significant others of the porters. These women were the backbone to the porters’ activism across Canada. Among their jobs was to maintain the administrative books, set the agendas for meetings of the porters, and to cater to out-of-town officials in the union movement.

The Women’s Auxiliary was indispensable to the work of the sleeping car porters. They were the main organizers when porters were working away from their communities. They helped run the recruitment drives and organized the business meetings for the local chapter of the BSCP. They planned the annual picnics and community dances and hosted visiting BSCP officials who could not find lodging in segregated hotels in their homes.

The Women’s Auxiliary participated fully at the BSCP conventions for delegates from across North America and helped to establish the priorities for the union. Joining with their counterparts in the United States, the Canadian Women’s Auxiliary lobbied governments for child labour laws, an eight-hour work day, equal pay for women, worker’s compensation and improved social housing.

 

The porters had to fight against white unions that would deny them membership in the new organization. Opposition to participation by the porters came from unions that wanted only unions representing white Canadians to be members of the new organization. The opponents to the Black porters were generally supportive of Canada’s racist policies that favoured white people, and they were against the porters’ opposition to these government policies.

But the porters eventually won the support of some of the leading trade unions in Toronto and wider Canada. This was part of the efforts by the unionized porters to find allies to support them in their political and civic battles for citizenship rights for all non-white peoples. Eventually, the organizers relented and allowed representatives of a Black union to participate. At the CLC founding convention in 1956, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) moved a number of resolutions asking organized labour to join in the fight against Canada’s racist immigration policies.

 

 

With the ending of WWII, Black people increasingly questioned their status in Canada.

Not only did Black men fight and die in the war but many of them worked on the hospitals on rails—special converted sleeping cars that transported wounded and sick soldiers returning home across Canada. All Canadians were first and foremost British subjects. This gave them many citizenship rights, such as the right to live in Canada and to have members of their family join them. With the exception of a few West Indians recruited to work as porters, Canada’s official policy was to exclude Black immigrants and visitors. Canada’s preference was for white or European immigrants. Black people took up the fight for equal treatment for all British subjects regardless of their perceived race or ethnicity.

“The Negro Citizenship Association…was born in response to the continuing appeals of our brothers and sisters who were experiencing untold indignities and hardships occasioned by the wholesale rejection of their attempts to be legally admitted to Canada. At that time, not even close relatives were admissible […] Our Association was born out of the heartaches, the pain and suffering of the Negro himself […] It is growing because it is watered by the tears of the suffering Negro, and it is being fed by the mil of human kindness of our white brethren, as evident today.” – Director’s Remarks on the presentation of the Negro Citizenship Association, April 27th, 1954. Delivered by NCA leader Donald Moore.

The Negro Citizenship Association was established in 1951 to give Black British subjects a voice in Canadian society. It was an umbrella group for many activist groups fighting for the same cause. Its members were primarily sleeping car porters and their spouses, if only because at that time jobs as sleeping car porters were the only work regularly available to Black people in Canada. Stanley Grizzle was a spokesman for the association as well as being the head of the Toronto chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His brother, Norman, was also an official of the association that was headed by its founder Donald Moore, a former porter.

 

In 1954, a delegation of Black people fighting for greater citizenship rights decided to take their fight to the federal government in Ottawa. They assembled at Union Station in Toronto for the eight-hour trip on a Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) train to Ottawa. The Toronto chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), a trade union of Black porters, helped pay the delegation’s fares. The briefs presented by Moore and Grizzle would sow the seeds that changed Canada into a multicultural society.

The delegation called on the Canadian government to stop its racist immigration policy that favoured white people. They recommended that Canada accept immigrants from all over the world. They argued for more immigrants in particular from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, China and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). These were the “coloured” areas from which Canada limited immigration to a few thousand annually. The delegates called for a special program that would allow Black women from the West Indies to work in Canada as domestic workers. The delegates also asked the government to allow large numbers of non-white immigrants into Canada. They suggested that once these immigrants were settled, they in turn should be allowed to sponsor family members to join them as immigrants to Canada. When enacted, the changes helped to fundamentally change the face of Canada, making Canada a multicultural country.

 

 

“The members and officials of the Negro Citizenship Association and the Toronto C.P.R. Division of the Sleeping Car Porters will continue to fight unremittingly for the right of all peoples of this planet to enter Canada and become its citizens without penalty or reward because of their race, colour, religion, national origin or ancestry. Yes, we take the uncompromising position that what appears to be the premeditated discrimination in Canada’s Immigration Laws and policy (is) utterly inconsistent with democratic principles and Christian ethics.” – Statement by Stanley G. Grizzle. Courtesy of Cecil Foster.

 

 

 

The BSCP was the main union that led the fight by porters for social and political change in Canada and the United States. Founded in New York by porters a few years earlier, the American BSCP was under the leadership of Asa Philip Randolph, an outstanding Black civil rights champion. Before that, porters in Canada had tried to form their own unions. These efforts were crushed by the railway companies. At Canadian National Railway (CNR), porters found themselves in a union which worked in league with management to keep the Black porters from working in other railway jobs reserved only for white people. At Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), porters were represented by a management-appointed association, which was intended to work with management on behalf of the porters. The porters found that in disputes around working conditions, the association tended to side with management. This meant the porters had no clout in negotiations as the association did not fully represent their interests. The BSCP stepped into this void and quickly established Canadian chapters, replacing the management-appointed associations.

Especially after World War II, Toronto would become the hot spot for union activity by the porters and their allies. One name stands out among the BSCP leadership: Stanley Grizzle, head of the Toronto chapter. In 1954, Grizzle and the Toronto Chapter paid the cost for a delegation of porters and their allies to travel from Toronto to Ottawa to meet with the government to protest the treatment of Black and other peoples of color. At this meeting, the porters called for drastic changes in Canadian immigration policies. They sowed the seeds of desegregation that would eventually bloom into the multicultural Canada of today.