They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada by Cecil Foster (review)

The railroad, metaphorically and literally, has figured prominently in nineteenth and twentieth centuries Black history in North America. The Underground Railroad, the largest freedom movement in North America, was a secret network of abolitionists who assisted African Americans escaping enslavement in the American South to free Northern states or further north to Canada. It is estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 freedom seekers entered British North America (Canada) via this clandestine network. Railway terminology such as "Underground Railroad," "conductor," "freight," were used as coded language. Freedom seekers also used the new mode of transportation to escape. In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman used the train across the Niagara River Suspension Bridge to transport freedom seekers into Canada on the last leg of their journey. At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the few places that Black men could find reliable employment in the United States and in Canada was on the railway.

In his latest book, They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, Cecil Foster gives an historical account of the labour history and working lives of Black porters in Canada and relates its/this history's intricate connection to Canadian immigration history. This lesser known historical narrative is told through individual stories of Black men who were employed as sleeping car porters. Foster opens the book with an introduction to the April 27, 1954 delegation to Ottawa by members of the Negro Citizenship Association, Black community activists and supporters, and some of their Jewish allies as the backdrop to the story. The delegates travelled by train from Toronto to Ottawa to demand that the federal government change the exclusionary definition of British subjects that blocked Black and African subjects in the Commonwealth from immigrating to Canada, and to open up the country's doors to racialized people from all around the world. The significance of this running narrative thread is that many of the organizers and delegates were porters and they travelled by train as a symbolic act.

The text details the working lives of sleeping car porters for readers to gain an understanding of what their work entailed. The job of train porters was to assist sleeping car passengers on their train travels from their arrival at the station to their departure. Red caps hauled luggage, made up sleeping berths, provided a range of personal services such as shining shoes and ironing clothes, served meals to passengers, and kept the cars clean. From the turn of the twentieth century through to the late 1960s, the occupation of porter was almost exclusively held by Black men. Foster notes that the term "sleeping car porter" became synonymous with "Black." (45) Their working conditions were deplorable. Porters worked long hours and were on-call 24-hours a day, sleeping only 3–4 hours a night as they criss-crossed the country. For this they received paltry pay. Porters were forced to do unpaid work and did not receive overtime pay. They were only paid for hours worked on the train, not for the time they spent preparing for their shifts or cleaning up after their shift ended. While some Black porters held seniority, most were intentionally designated as casual and on-call employees. They did not receive any extended health benefits, no leave, no pension, and lived under the constant threat of dismissal for even the smallest infractions. Adding to these conditions was the fact that railway trade unions made it their mandate not to protect the rights of Black workers.

Foster's careful analysis of the intersection of race, gender, and class in the experiences of Black porters and Black Canadians more broadly, contributes to the study of Black labour in Canada. His research demonstrates how employment opportunities were dictated by race and that a racial hierarchy was firmly entrenched in the organizational structure...