Imaging "An Uncle Tom"


    During the 1920s the Pullman Company was the nation's largest single employer of blacks, who were hired to work as porters on railroad trains. Beginning in 1925, A. Philip Randolph, a co-founder of the African American monthly magazine titled The Messenger, began an aggressive campaign to unionize the porters. As part of the campaign, one or two political cartoons appeared in the magazine every month between December 1925 and April 1927. 11 of these contained representations of "Uncle Toms," the term Randolph used to describe both the Negro leaders and newspaper editors who served as spokesmen for the Company's anti-union counter-campaign and all black Pullman porters who were unwilling to force a confrontation with their employers.

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