In the Oakland Main Library history room there is a book-length CL Dellums interview/memoir that I love to read when I’m there. It’s a blue-bound Reference book so you can’t check it out. Even when they were renovating the library last year, they wouldn’t let me take it home. So often I sit at a square table there and read it.
Dellums was born in 1900 and died in 1989. He was a towering human rights figure and the book is full of great American stories from his life and times. (He was the uncle of long-time Oakland Congressman and eventual mayor, Ron Dellums.)
Born in a small town in Texas, CL Dellums came west to work first as a ship porter on passenger runs between LA and Seattle and then as a Pullman porter on the Southern Pacific Railway out of Oakland.
Like so many after him, it was in Oakland that he was first awakened to the plight of African Americans seeking steady work and a fair wage. Here he helped organize and then led the union of Pulman Porters, working out of the West Oakland train terminal. Eventually he led the West Coast chapter of the NAACP.
It was hard work being a porter. You earned $60/month if you were fully employed on a regular train route. You had to work 300 hours in a month to make that $60, and you had to spend plenty of time away from home.
Again, Dellums tells many stories about the fight for fair work and wages for the Black train porters, but I can’t help but think that one of those stories in particular, about the annual Pacific Coast Chamber of Commerce summer train trip down to Mexico City, would be a perfect setting for a period movie, a 1920’s story of Prohibition drunkenness, contraband, bribery, labor, resourcefulness and necessity.
This movie’s story would be told from a sober porter’s perspective. There would be sympathetic passengers and racist passengers, smart people and not so smart people. Drunk people. It would be funny and sad, frustrating and poignant. It could be the story of his founding of the union of Black Pullman porters.
It would open with the daily morning gathering of porters outside the West Oakland offices of the “sign-up man,” the white man who assigned passenger train runs to any porters who didn’t have a regular gig. Rain or shine, black porters were not allowed to go inside the office, until Dellums himself just started going in on bad-weather days.
He says that in general he was not liked by the sign-up man.
“I didn’t clown,” he says. “No scraping and bowing, no grinning around him…” And it reminds you of the roles people were forced to play, the behavior that was expected, even required, of them to show that they knew their place; if they didn’t play the role – and Dellums himself didn’t -- it could affect their bottom line, their income and livelihood. Certainly work for Dellums dried up the more he became involved in organizing and agitating. You took a risk just to be yourself, the risk in retaining your dignity. Often when I'm watching old movies with Black characters, I am reminded about what Dellums says about the expectations to always be "scraping and bowing" in the presence of whites.
Anyway…the Jazz Age Junket:
Every summer the Pacific Coast Chamber of Commerce held a convention in Mexico City. It's thrilling to imagine the pleasures and excitement of Mexico City in the 1920s.
The trip would originate from the Oakland train terminal. Dellums says there would be 200 Pullman train cars going down to Mexico from Oakland and senior porters would get pulled off their regular routes to staff them.
It was a good gig for a porter because everyone on board would drink a lot and spend a lot of money and give copious tips to the porters out of drunken generosity. And perhaps also as a kind of bribe, so that what happened on the train stayed on the train.
“They would get to drinking,” says Dellums, “and give the porters money.”
The passengers and crew and cars would be down in Mexico City for four day. Because there weren’t enough hotels in the big city, many stayed the whole time in the Pullman cars. I can’t even imagine the debauchery that went on among the passengers on these Jazz Age rail junkets to Mexico City.
The porters had some adventures as well.
Dellums says that none of the porters on the run spoke Spanish. Or, they only knew one word, and he can’t, or shouldn’t, say what it was. The implication being that it would be impolite to say it out loud.
By the end of their time in Mexico City, everyone would have filled up the cars with good liquor.
“They would bring all this liquor back to the States,” says Dellums. “Nobody carried any more clothes in their bags than they had to, and some would carry a bag with nothing in it so that they could fill it full of liquor to bring back. The porters, the conductors and everybody in the crew would fill up all the space they could. Those cars would come back full of liquor.”
Since the train was full of Chamber of Commerce big shots, no one at the border would bother them or check their baggage. Illegal booze would flow into Northern California, to be used for a variety of purposes.
Back home in Oakland, the Black porters would use the liquor they had smuggled in to bribe the sign-up man. Or they would take some of the extra money they'd made, place it inside a magazine someone had left on the train, then give it to the sign-up man, saying, “Someone left this Newsweek on the train, I brought it to you because I thought you might like to read it.” Get the man drunk, ply him with your hard-earned tips, whatever it took to get steadier work.
Eventually, once Dellums started coming inside the sign-up office on bad weather days, other porters started coming in there as well and then they changed the policy so that no one had to stand outside in the rain while they waited to see if there was work that day.
CL Dellums was a leader in thought, in strategy and in action. And he had some good stories to tell.
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