In the Trenches of World War I-Era Texas: Letters from Black Railroaders to the United States Railroad Administration

Members of the Colored Trainmen of America, a union based in Houston, Texas; Kingsville, Texas; and DeQuincy, Louisiana. The organization got its start with the letter-writing campaigns of the World War I-era. RG R 0003-004, Colored Trainmen of America Collection, Houston Public Library, African American Library at the Gregory School.

In the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, inside fraying, bent folders, each bound by a pushpin, sit hundreds of World War I-era letters from Black railroad workers. The missives sit in the files of a long-forgotten federal agency, the United States Railroad Administration (USRA), which, during the "Great War," managed the nation's railroads. The letters convey the aspirations and frustrations of Black railroaders from across the country. More than 120 of the letters were written by people from the Lone Star State. The main catalyst for this flood of mail was the USRA's call for substantial wage increases, back pay, and equal pay for equal work. As their peers did nationally, the 128 Black petitioners in Texas pressed the government to enforce its own mandates. Many sought an outcome that was extraordinary in its boldness: to realize the democratic and egalitarian promise of the war in one of the most rigidly segregated and discriminatory industries in the nation. The remnants of their labors allow a reconstruction of World War I-era Texas civil rights and labor struggles heretofore hidden from view.

Previous scholars have studied Black railroad workers' communications to the USRA and contributed an understanding of the roots, context, and consequences of their efforts. Historians Joe Trotter and Liesl Miller Orenic contend that the letters' authors sought to "transform policies" of the federal government "into a vehicle for the improvement of their own position in the railroad industry." Paul Michel Taillon cast the letters as an "empowering" form of "political action" that held up the ideal of equal citizenship and challenged the government to fulfill its true role as an impartial arbiter and guarantor of justice. Other historians, chiefly Eric Arnesen and Joseph Kelly, have drawn on the USRA collection as part of broader regional and national studies. Scholars have yet to piece together a story around the correspondence from World War I-era Texas and determine what they reveal about Black workers in that specific time and place.¹

Historians of early twentieth-century Texas Black working-class history have mined a plethora of sources, including oral histories, government and company documents, legal and union records, newspaper reports, and the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).² The petitions to the USRA open yet another portal into this past. They are unique in that they relate, in immediate, raw form, the desires and strategies of Black working-class actors who lived more than a century ago. Few other direct sources exist on Black railroaders.³ The letters are also notable in that the names of professionals and business and community leaders are largely absent from mention. The railroad porters, brakemen, porter-brakemen, and shop workers who authored or signed these communications seem to have acted and thought independently of the broader community leadership. For the most part, they did not organize under the mantel of the NAACP, which in 1919 boasted almost eight thousand Texas members.⁴ Such an example of working-class selforganization goes against the grain of the historiography, which tends to highlight cross-class cooperation or the activism of the Black middle class.⁵

The letters show that a mass of Black railroaders coordinated along racial lines among fellow local railroad workers or attached themselves to regional or national organizations of this nature. Their very signatures are testimony to the collective nature of their endeavors; numerous letters list multiple claimants or record the name of an individual that the others had chosen to sign on their behalf. While some authors appealed carefully to White paternalism, a...