Band together: Premiering drama explores founding of world’s first Black-led union
So many lost or forgotten chapters of history tell the stories behind the everyday functions of society. One such lesser-told chronicle is that of the world’s first Black-led union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925. A new, joint CBC/BET+ drama series begins exploring the foundation of that union when “The Porter” premieres Monday, Feb. 21, on BET+.
For those who may need a quick history lesson on the subject of “The Porter,” the series details the lives of Pullman porters in the 1920s. Porters were Canadian and American railway attendants hired to work on sleeper cars. George Pullman, the founder of the Pullman Company, only hired Black men as porters, and their duties included delivering food and drinks to passengers, shining shoes and keeping the cars clean. Women, meanwhile, were hired as maids to wait on female passengers’ needs, such as manicures, washing, mending clothes and child care.
Porters and maids were responsible for giving middle-class passengers the experience of being waited on like the wealthy. As a tough job with tremendously long hours and very little pay, porters were also subjected to discrimination on the job from passengers and their employers. A demeaning practice across many Pullman cars was calling porters “George,” regardless of their actual names, effectively referring to them as an extension of George Pullman himself.
After the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, wages and working conditions slowly improved until the Pullman Company folded in 1969.
Ronnie Rowe Jr. (“Star Trek: Discovery”) and Aml Ameen (“I May Destroy You”) star as soldiers-turned-porters Zeke Garrett and Junior Massey, men striving to organize their fellow railway attendants. Mouna Traoré (“Murdoch Mysteries”) is Marlene Massey, Junior’s wife and a singer in Montreal’s Little Burgundy jazz scene, while Loren Lott (“The Young and the Restless”) plays Lucy Conrad, an aspiring singer trying to break into Marlene’s scene despite facing racism and colorism every step of the way.