The row of African American men in the black and white photo were a stark contrast to the dollar-store prints sitting on a rack at the auction house. They had the faces of proud men – some smiling, some not, most in ties and all in conductor hats.
I saw them the moment I entered the box-lot room and immediately headed toward them. It was an enlarged version of a photo with foam backing, suitable for framing. I checked the back but found nothing to identify the men, the circumstances of the photo or the date. Who were they, I wondered.
The eight men were standing in front of a trolley car with the number 52 at the top. I assumed the photo was taken in Philadelphia, which has long had an extensive transportation system that still includes trolley cars. I put the photo back in its place, not sure if I would bid on it or not.
But it continued to nag me. Even without knowing who these men were, I knew this was a historical photo and that there must be a story behind it. First, I searched for 52nd Street trolley, and found that there had been one. According to one site, it was operated by the Philadelphia Transportation Co. (PTC), became a bus line in 1956 and was now known as Route K.
On further research, I found that the 52 line was insignificant in this photo. The story, as I thought when I first saw the photo, was the eight men. It appeared to be a photo of the first black motormen for the Philadelphia transit system. Their promotion sparked a week-long wildcat strike in August 1944 by white workers protesting the hiring of African Americans in jobs that they considered “white only.”
I found a photo of one of the black motormen, James Stewart, as he was being trained by a white worker aboard a trolley. He appears to be the fifth person from the left in the auction photo.
This was amazing. This strike was considered historically significant in the overall fight against discrimination in the work place and for the enforcement of civil rights laws by the federal government.
Streetcars or trolleys had been in Philadelphia since the 1850s, starting as horse-drawn and then becoming electrical around 1915. Early on, blacks were not even allowed to ride them, until the late-19th century when Octavius Catto spearheaded a campaign to change that. He organized what would now be called trolley sit-ins, leading to a state bill that outlawed segregated streetcars.
By the 1940s, blacks could not get a job as a streetcar operator, and were routinely hired instead in menial jobs. A few years before the strike, the NAACP and other groups repeatedly petitioned the PTC to allow blacks to be trained for better jobs as motormen, conductors, bus drivers and station clerks. Both the company and union balked.
Impatient with this foot-dragging, the federal government forced the PTC to hire (or promote) blacks for 100 jobs that had recently come open. The eight black workers started on Aug. 1, 1944, and in protest, nearly 10,000 white workers went on an unauthorized strike. For nearly a week, trolleys, buses and trains did not move and the city was paralyzed.
At the time, the country was in the middle of World War II, and Philadelphia had proven itself as a major producer of war materials. When the streetcars stayed in their carbarns – that’s what the storage areas were called – very few people went to work, so production stopped. President Roosevelt sent in the Army to take over the PTC and operate the transit system.
Invoking the Smith-Connally Act forbidding strikes in war-related industries, Roosevelt gave the men an ultimatum: return to work or face losing their jobs or having their draft deferments lifted. A day later, the white workers were back on the job. By year’s end, 900 blacks had been hired by the company.
Here’s the reaction of some of the eight workers, taken from a paper by labor historian James Wolfinger about the strike:
“They all told reporters they thought of themselves as pioneers and that, with the government’s help, they would make it. Their ‘implicit faith’ in the government, as one reporter put it, led them to believe federal authorities would ‘take swift action to guarantee [their] rights’. Some still had nagging doubts, however, about what the strike said about American society. One of the drivers’ wives, after telling a reporter her husband had served nine months in the south Pacific, said, ‘What I wonder about is whether the sacrifice was worth it?’ When the strike ended a few days later and African Americans began taking trolleys out on their runs, most of the city’s blacks would have answered yes to her question.”
At the auction, as I stood waiting for other items to come up for bids in the box-lot room, another auction-goer spotted the photo and said quickly, “I want that.” I didn’t say a word, because deep inside I knew that I wanted it, too, but I still wasn’t sure I’d bid on it. He’d probably try to sell it; I wanted to keep it for myself.
Unfortunately, I had just stepped away with another purchase when the photo came up for auction. A few minutes later, the other auction-goer walked up to me with it in his hands. I had missed it. Darn.
