Porter talk: Episode 1

A painted portrait of Citizenship Judge Stanley Grizzle by William J. Stapleton. 

Discover Library and Archives Canada presents “Porter Talk.” This mini-series explores the lived experiences of Black men who laboured as porters for both the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways during the twentieth century.

Stanley G. Grizzle, a Canadian Pacific Railway porter for twenty years as well as a celebrated activist, civil servant, and citizenship judge, was also an avid historian who went to great lengths to document and preserve Black History in Canada and beyond. His collection is now held at Library and Archives Canada. Join us as we delve into the life of the man who recorded the stories of the porters working on the rails. (Episode 1)

Duration: 46:39

File size: 64 MB Download MP3

Publish Date: August 29, 2024

Host: Richard Provencher, Chief, Media Relations, Communications and Policy Branch

Featuring the voices of: Stanley G. Grizzle, Raymond Coker, Melvin Crump, Clarence Nathaniel Este, George Forray, Eddie Green, Odelle Holmes, Leonard Oscar Johnston, Elaine Russell Padmore, Willis Richardson, James Laverne Robbins, Helen Wachter, Roy Williams

Guests: Dr. Melinda Chateauvert, Dr. Cecil Foster, Stanley Edwin Grizzle Jr., Dr. Steven High, Dr. Saje Mathieu, Dr. Dorothy Williams

Voiceover for the French version of this podcast: Roldson Dieudonné, Lerntz Joseph and Euphrasie Mujawamungu

Narrator biographies

Interviewer

Stanley G. Grizzle, the eldest of seven children, was born in Toronto in 1918. His parents, both of whom immigrated from Jamaica in 1911, worked in the service sector: his mother as a domestic servant and his father as a chef for the Grand Trunk Railway. Poverty and a lack of opportunities led Grizzle to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1940, where he began a 20-year career as a sleeping car porter. In 1942, he was conscripted by the Canadian Government, attaining corporal status while he served as a medic in Holland. In 1962, Grizzle left the CPR and became the first Black Canadian to be employed by the Ontario Ministry of Labour. He ran unsuccessfully for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation before being appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau as a judge in the court of Canadian citizenship in 1978. A devoted activist, Grizzle campaigned tirelessly for reforms in Canadian labour, immigration, and human rights policies. He was also an avid historian dedicated to documenting and preserving Black History in Canada. His collection is held at Library and Archives Canada.

Narrators

Raymond Coker was an industrial chemist as well as a talented musician. Racism made it impossible for him to gain steady employment in either field, leading him to the Toronto Division of the Canadian National Railway (CNR). Here he laboured as a sleeping car porter and a buffet porter until changes in the collective agreement, made possible with the implementation of the Fair Employment Practices Act (1951), enabled him to be appointed to the position of conductor. (Source: 417381)

Melvin Crump was born in Edmonton in 1916 to a family that immigrated to Keystone, Alberta, from Oklahoma in 1911 under the Homestead Act. Uninterested in farming, he became a CPR sleeping car porter in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. He worked out of the Calgary Division until 1954, where he served as chairman of the BSCP Safety Committee. (Source: 417403)

Clarence Nathaniel Este was born in Antigua in 1903. He immigrated to Canada in 1926 where he quickly gained employment as a sleeping car porter for the Montreal Division of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). A rank-and-file member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he worked tirelessly for the company for forty-two years. His brother, famed Reverend Charles H. Este, who led Union United Church for nearly half a century, was one of the only Black priests in Canada to publicly advocate for the unionization of porters. (Source: 417405 [part 1]; 417386 [part 2])

George Forray was born in Montréal in 1911 to immigrant parents from Grenada and Guadalupe. In 1937, while travelling home from Mount Allison University, the CPR recruited him to work as a sleeping car porter for the summer. Forray never returned to school and remained with the company for 40 years. He was a proud member of the BSCP throughout his service on the rails. (Source: 417383)

Eddie Green was part of a large, close-knit family, composed of eight children. Taking after their father, he and his siblings were talented amateur artists who regularly competed against each other in friendly competitions judged by their mother. None, however, could make ends meet with their craft. To support the family, Green’s father worked as a cook for the CPR, a job with connections that led to his son’s hiring as a sleeping car porter for the company’s Montreal Division during the Depression, in 1937. (Source: 417379)

Odelle Holmes was born in Clearview, Oklahoma, in 1915. When Holmes was two years old, his family immigrated to Canada, settling in Maidstone, Saskatchewan, where most of his mother’s family already resided; they came to the country as part of the Great Migration of 1910. His father remained in the U.S., formally separating from his mother. After Holmes’s mother remarried, the family moved to Lloydminster, where he worked several low-paying, menial jobs before gaining employment as a sleeping car porter with the CPR’s Calgary Division in 1940 and then its Vancouver Division in 1961. During Holmes’s thirty-eight-year career, he was heavily involved in the union movement, serving as President of both the Calgary (fourteen years) and Vancouver (thirteen years) Divisions of the BSCP. (Source: 417389)

Leonard Oscar Johnston was born in Toronto in 1918. Like other Black men, abject racism limited his early employment options, leading him to the CPR, where he began working as a sleeping car porter for the Toronto Division in 1940. His career was cut short at the thirty-seven-year mark as a result of the chronic back problems that he developed on the job; thankfully, he was able to access a disability pension, however meagre. While Johnston was a rank-and-file member of the BSCP throughout his tenure with the CPR, his Communist Party of Canada affiliation complicated his belonging. The BSCP distrusted him; for his part, he maintained distance from its actions. Johnston’s worldview was grounded in both ideology and lived experiences, pushing him to understand his labour exploitation as part of a greater race and class struggle. (Source: 417394 [part 1]; 417396 [part 2])

Elaine Russell Padmore was the daughter of a CPR sleeping car porter based out of the company’s Montreal Division. She grew up in a home where porters’ exploitative working conditions were regularly discussed at the kitchen table alongside the possibilities and promises of unionization. Her father served as the President of the Montreal Division of the Porters’ Mutual Benefit Association, a company-led union with porter representation that lobbied for workers’ rights prior to the creation of the BSCP. While he himself did not get to experience many of the positive changes brought about by unionization, Padmore’s father revelled in the gains made for his fellow porters. Given her father’s lived realities and the structural, systemic and everyday racism that limited his opportunities in society, Padmore was encouraged to attend school and completed her education at Sir George Williams Business College, the precursor of Concordia University. (Source: 417383)

Willis Richardson was born in Strathmore, Alberta, in 1913. He grew up and laboured on farms and ranches until 1940, when he made his first trip as a CPR sleeping car porter, running out of its Calgary Division. Richardson took great pride in his position, recognizing the benefits of steady employment and the status it accorded him within his community. He remained a rank-and-file BSCP member throughout his thirty-five-year tenure, helping to grieve and improve unfair labour conditions. (Source: 417389)

James Laverne Robbins was born in February 1919 in North Buxton, Ontario, a community that was established by formerly enslaved African Americans who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railway to gain freedom. Robbins began working for the CPR’s Toronto Division in June 1940 after being recruited by Reverend CA Johnson, of the British Methodist Episcopal Church, who also laboured as a porter. In his early years, Robbins just worked summers. After the end of the Second World War, in which he served for four and a half years, he joined the CPR fulltime, labouring for the company until his retirement in 1979. (Source: 417393 [part 2])

Helen Wachter was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1918. Her father’s work as a chef and then sleeping car porter for the CPR took her family to Edmonton and Winnipeg. Wachter’s first husband, as well as her father-in-law, also worked as porters for the CPR. Because of her close connection with the profession, Wachter became a devoted member of the BSCP’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, serving as secretary-treasurer of the Winnipeg Division. (Source: 417396)

Roy Williams was born in 1903 in Waco, Texas. His large family, which included twelve children, immigrated to Canada in stages. Williams himself came in 1910 as part of the Black Migration movement, settling with his family members in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, before moving to a homestead in Hillside. Seasonal jobs in construction and farming occupied his youth until the job crisis caused by the Depression led him to Winnipeg in 1936 to work as a sleeping car porter for the CPR. One year later, the company transferred Williams to Calgary, where he remained on the job 32 more years. Williams played an integral role in organizing the BSCP in Calgary and later served as Secretary-Treasurer of the union local for sixteen years. His wife, Cordie Williams, was also involved in the union movement, through her participation in the BSCP Ladies’ Auxiliary. (Source: 417402 [part 1]; 417389 [part 2])

Scholars, Family Members, and Members of the Community

Dr. Melinda Chateauvert holds a PhD in American History from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 1998 book, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, documents the actions African American women in the United States and Canada undertook in organizing local chapters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first international Black trade union in the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. It continues to be a seminal text in labour history. Prior to her retirement, Dr. Chateauvert served as Associate Director at the Front Porch Research Strategy.

Dr. Cecil Foster is a prolific writer and journalist who holds a PhD from York University. Currently, he serves as Chairman of the Department of Transnational Studies at the University of Buffalo. Dr. Foster’s work has long focused on multiculturalism in Canada and the role of race in this policy. His most recent book, They Called Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, tells the story of the first delegation of Black Canadians to meet with members of the federal Cabinet to discuss Canada’s discriminatory immigration practices. This trip, rooted in a long history of porter activism, paved the way for changes to the nation’s immigration policies, as well as those related to labour and human rights.

Stanley Edwin Grizzle Jr. is the son of Stanley G. Grizzle and the fourth of seven children in the Grizzle family. A successful entrepreneur and innovator, his father’s activism and drive for change has long inspired and captivated him. Mr. Grizzle Jr. is also a talented musician in his own right, a hobby that found inspiration in the time he spent with his father. Now retired, he continues to find solace in nature, exploring the outdoors with a paddle in hand.

Dr. Steven High is a Full Professor of History at Concordia University; he also founded the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling there. He holds a PhD in Canadian History from the University of Ottawa. Dr. High’s most recent award-winning book, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class, tells the story of two neighbourhoods, one predominantly white and the other black, situated in Montreal’s southwest district.

Dr. Saje Mathieu is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She holds a joint PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale University and has been a fellow at the Warren Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her first book, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955, details the history of African American and West Indian sleeping car porters in Canada and the social, cultural, legal and political impacts of their employment. Dr. Mathieu’s current work is focused on the global experiences of Black soldiers during World War I.

Dr. Dorothy Williams holds a PhD in Library and Information Sciences from McGill University and currently works as a researcher at Concordia University within its Quebec English-Speaking Communities Research Network. She was bestowed a CBC Black Changemaker Award in 2022 and a Library and Archives Canada Scholar Award in 2023. In spring 2024, she was accorded the Ordre de Montréal, the city’s highest honour for outstanding contributions made to the city’s development and renown, as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Dr. Williams’ books, Blacks in Montreal: 1628–1986 and The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal, are classics in the fields of Black studies and Black history in Canada. Dr. Williams is also a pedagogical pioneer who has long contributed to the development of curriculum pertaining to Black history in Canada, as well as a community knowledge keeper. The archival collection she cares for in her home is one of the most extensive existing archives to document Black experience in Montreal.

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