CHAPTER 8

The Black Decade

Thomas Beer’s “Mauve Decade” seems to have set a fashion in associating decades and colors. . . . Some enterprising person should write the history of the present epoch under the caption of “The Black Decade.”

—EDEN BLISS, 1926¹

Given the often mean reception that black college boys could expect at northern colleges, it was no wonder that so many sought refuge under the Williams roof on Strivers’ Row. In 1924 at Columbia University, a campus-bodied Ku Klux Klan group actually burned a cross in front of the Furnald Hall dormitory to drive out a black law student. Frederick W. Wells, the targeted youth, refused to vacate, for which he had the university’s support, as one newspaper tersely reported: “The boy was brave, and so was the dean, and the attack failed.”²

However the following year, no doubt hoping to avoid another outburst, Columbia’s more cautious solution was a dormitory segregation policy. Students filling out the dorm room application had to mark a space for “race.” Whether to assuage befuddlement or avoid controversy, the application explained that the question “is desired in order to assist in congenial grouping in the halls.” One black student—who had already lived three summer sessions in campus rooms without incident—applied for a 1925 residence assignment this way:

Dear Sir:

Enclosed you will please find my application for room in residence halls filled out to the best of my knowledge. The space where you ask for designation of race I have filled as specifically as possible. Like a very large percentage of the population of America (perhaps a majority) I am not a member of any one race, but of several races.³

By responding to the “race” question by writing in “American,” this renewing student apparently failed “to apply in the regular way” that the Committee on Men’s Residence Halls deemed satisfactory. Refused a dormitory assignment, the student lodged at nearby International House instead.

How college students in similar situations came to find a refuge in the Williams home is a mystery, but the entire student debating team of the New York chapter of Omega Psi Phi (the first African-American fraternity founded by Howard University in 1911) was living at 226 West 138th Street—Williams’s address. And Lucy Williams’s philanthropic Harlem social club, Semper Fidelis (Ever Loyal), offered a fifty-dollar stipend “to any woman student of excellent scholarship, morally worthy, and in need of assistance who wishes to continue her studies beyond high school.” That Thanksgiving the regally beautiful Gertrude—nominated by a student-led Negro Youth Movement—was crowned Queen of the Annual Howard-Lincoln Football Classic Day.⁴ Indeed, student life and matters permeated the Williams household.

At Grand Central, the labyrinthine terminal was too vast and kinetic for the Chief to monitor alone. He assigned captains to keep a vigilant eye on key entrances and platforms. But of course he had to answer for any laxity. “We choose them carefully,” Chief Williams told a reporter. “They must give references going back for five years, and these are carefully investigated before they are given employment.”⁵

Ads for the Cafe Savarin across the street from the terminal advised travelers to “ask the Red Cap” to direct them. Spur, November 15, 1924.

In the mid-1920s, the Chief had no regular formula for procuring new Red Cap workers, because numerous methods suited the purpose. Present Red Caps commonly vouched for a friend or family member as a fine hard worker—like Sam Boyd, who brought his future son-in-law Samuel Delany into the workforce. Many young men sought out Williams, perhaps with a letter of recommendation in hand (or perhaps not) from a community leader, a school dean or professor, or a cleric. Williams’s sisters Ella and Lena, who ran the Colored Mission, which was also an employment agency, probably referred men occasionally to their well-positioned brother. In addition, the Chief could readily recruit young job seekers on the northeast corner of the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 135th Street—called the “Campus,” this was the effective commons of Harlem’s college youth. They emerged on late summer afternoons especially, as shadows began to stretch from the City College hill. For a young student looking to work, everyone seemed to agree, “you would always be able to find him on the Campus.”

The Campus quad was the generous sidewalk that traced the curved redbrick facade of the Chelsea Bank. Two doors to the left of the bank’s Seventh Avenue entrance was Jackson’s Pharmacy, which the students used as an ad hoc communication and business headquarters. To the right of the bank, a few yards east, was the stoop of the Y, a dormitory for numberless collegians. The curbside abounded with young men who came up from Howard, Hampton, Lincoln, Morehouse, Morgan, Tuskegee, and many other black colleges and met, for the first time, the rare blacks in northern white colleges like Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and so on. The students also met socially at baseball games between the two Red Caps teams, or at the Howard-Lincoln football classic.

On the Campus, the young men emerged to solve the ills of the world. “Most of our present outstanding professional men, teachers, and leaders used to argue and debate and joke and ‘clown’ on the campus,” the educator Arthur P. Davis later wrote.⁶ Enduring friendships formed here as well. Elliott Hoffman had come north to earn money for school and spent the summer working at Grand Central. Two days after he quit, as he left the College Station Branch post office with $229—his entire summer savings—crooks robbed him. His friends rallied to raise the money for his carfare and entrance fees.⁷

Brooklynite Gus Moore, a Boys High School track and field star, saved for college as a Grand Central Red Cap. During St. Bonaventure’s 1927–28 track season, Moore (right end of front row) roomed with Vincent “Roi” Ottley (top row, third from left), well-known journalist and author. St. Bonaventure University Archives.

The students were not here on leisure vacations. Though they commiserated with each other over jobs for which they were infinitely overqualified, they dutifully disposed themselves to work. Both Grand Central and Penn Station required additional summer hands, so Chief Williams could rely on the Campus to fill shortages at the terminal with college men, who were conspicuous.

A writer at the Baltimore Afro encountered myriad teachers and students, who were purportedly attending Columbia’s summer school, well off campus in the city. “I am led to believe that that noble seat of learning has moved from the venerable old hill and is now holding classes in the Grand Central Station,” he wrote, “where many of the alleged students are wearing the regular college regulation outfit of red cap and blue jumper with a number on the sleeve.”⁸ One who worked as a Red Cap was a medical student at Meharry College in Nashville, Tennessee. Walter Dawkins was lauded as “an example of the colored youth who is trying to attain his goal by his own bootstraps.”⁹

Lester Granger was another such exemplary student. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1918, he served in France, then returned to resume his education. Williams hired him as a Red Cap at Grand Central: the veteran doughboy studied social work at New York University. “In the summers of 1920 and ’21, and through the winter of 1922, I roamed the paved stretches of the station’s labyrinths,” Granger later recalled, praising Williams for opening up these lucrative “vacation” jobs to college students. He confessed, however, that “most of us were scared half to death of him.” One particular night when he should have been at the station, Granger was in Williams’s own home on Strivers’ Row, visiting the beautiful Gertrude. His boss caught him. “I sat paralyzed,” Granger remembered, until the Chief “nodded briefly, said ‘Good evening, Granger,’ and passed down the hall.” The Chief never mentioned the incident afterward, and Gertrude’s recollection is unknown.¹⁰

Between 1920 and 1922, Lieut. Lester B. Granger worked as a Grand Central Red Cap while studying social work at New York University, and later became a well-known civic leader of the National Urban League. Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection, Emory University, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

Mary White Ovington had once recollected Frederick Douglass claiming toward the end of the previous century that his color had become “an unfashionable one.” But in the fall of 1925, Chief Williams was now observing the race soaring into vogue and prominence. Clarence Darrow, the lawyer famous for the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” had also won the acquittal of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black doctor who shot and killed a white man in self-defense. And the popular general interest magazine Survey Graphic devoted an entire issue called “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” The Harlem Renaissance was an especially salient topic in 1925.

However that fall the Grand Central School of Art, on the seventh floor of the terminal, emerged as the site of intense discrimination. The art school wasn’t part of the Chief’s rounds, but when it opened two and a half years earlier, in the spring of 1923, he rode upstairs for a special reception to familiarize the Red Cap porters so they could direct travelers there. The American painters Walter Leighton Clark, John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, and others had launched the art school concurrently with the sixth-floor Grand Central Art Galleries. The school’s enrollment of over four hundred students that first year soon more than doubled, making the Grand Central School of Art one of the city’s largest art schools. Many of the noted instructors were a draw for students.

Frank Smalls was one aspiring artist who applied. He had finished a private school curriculum in portrait painting and for the past two years had studied at the Brooklyn Art Institute. The only black student there, he enjoyed “equal instructions & courtesy as the white pupils.” Yet despite his promising résumé, the Grand Central School of Art denied his application. The school’s secretary assured Smalls that, while the school had no colored people in its classes, it had “no personal objection” to them. “We think, however, that you would be more comfortable at the Art Students’ League,” she wrote, “where they have quite a few of your race enrolled.” (Six years later the same secretary would reject two black artists, Elba Lightfoot and Zell Ingram, a close friend of Langston Hughes, citing the school’s “racial quota.”) Frustrated, Smalls wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois at the NAACP, enclosing the rejection letter. Though Du Bois promised Smalls he would try to follow up on the matter, the outcome isn’t clear.¹¹

Smalls turned from artistic pursuits to freelance writing for the black press. While taking evening degree courses at City College and Columbia University, he took a job as one of the first black station agents (later promoted to dispatcher) when the new Eighth Avenue subway system opened in 1932.

Another young man, Richard Huey, applied to Chief Williams for a job at Grand Central. He had been a student at Virginia’s Hampton Institute until a hunch that the school aimed to make him a farmer sent him fleeing west to law school. In Los Angeles, he had fairly stumbled into performing in W.E.B. Du Bois’s historical pageant Star of Ethiopia, cast as King Solomon. Afterward Huey returned east—he arrived in New York and inevitably settled in Harlem. He started a course in social sciences at City College, but needing some interim grunt work to make ends meet, he headed to Grand Central.

Chief Williams turned Huey down at first, but the young man’s personal letter of recommendation got his attention:

To Whom It May Concern:

I have known Richard James Huey personally for about a year, but he was introduced to me by close friends in Los Angeles, Dr. and Mrs. John Somerville, who have known him for a long time and who vouched for his good character and ability. I shall be glad of any favors shown him.¹²

It was signed by W.E.B. Du Bois himself.

While redcapping, Huey landed his first New York acting job, in Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama In Abraham’s Bosom, co-starring Jules Bledsoe, Abbie Mitchell, and Rose McClendon. Though the production was on Broadway, it paid too little for him to quit his Red Cap job. Williams let Huey work around his theater schedule.

Huey said that Williams was “always lenient on boys he knows are trying to do something worthwhile on the outside.” Williams told Red Caps that the work was “only something temporary until they can do better.” Huey would recall, “I made contacts and moved up in the world to be a Red Cap in Grand Central Station. Make no mistake, that was movin’ up.”¹³ For indeed, redcapping enabled him to keep his sights on Broadway—and to conquer it.

With a reference from W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Huey got a Red Cap job in 1925, from which he emerged an influential Broadway actor, restaurateur, booking agent, and radio moderator. Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection, Emory University, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Photo: Erich Kastan.

In 1914 writer Charles Searle wrote an article about the history of American livery, or uniformed service. He imagined the predicament of a bewildered couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, alighting at Grand Central Terminal: they immediately faced the prospect of navigating their unwieldy luggage down the long platform toward the concourse, then to a taxi stand. But then a Red Cap magically appeared. At a signal from Mr. Jones, the smiling African under the crimson headgear gathered the baggage and led the way. Once he set them up in a taxi, Mr. Jones fished out “the small gratuity which he drops into the dark palm,” grateful to whatever unknown genius thought up that conspicuous red cap, “the chief object of livery—identification.”¹⁴ But in fact livery had two focal points, not only the conspicuous crimson headwear but the “smiling African” and the “dark palm.”

From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, the visual culture of American railway travel included the presence of black workers. Perhaps most saliently romanticized was the folk hero John Henry, a mythically strong “steel-drivin’ man” who pounded metal stakes into rocks to construct railroad tracks. But by and large, the traveling public typically recognized service workers within the setting of a rail terminal, platform, or train car: the legion of black male Pullman train porters and Red Cap station porters. Even to nontravelers, they were iconic and familiar through media, whose stereotypical depictions of them ranged from the subliminal to the grotesque.

One artist’s model for magazine advertisements and book illustrations portrayed anonymous porters with remarkable humanity: Maurice Hunter. For several decades starting about 1920, he was ubiquitous in commercial print illustrations, on the covers and pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty, and other national magazines. And he appeared in advertisements promoting everything from soft drinks to hard liquor, from holiday virtues to civic works.

Artists and sculptors praised Hunter for his perfect physique––he stood five-eleven and weighed 165 pounds––and for his sense of drama that inspirited his poses with character. He was described as the “prototype of Pullman porter” and, more widely, as “Harlem’s man of a thousand faces.” He deployed “unusual powers of facial expression,” Lester Walton noted, that, enhanced by his often self-made costumes and adept pantomime, made him the country’s foremost Negro artist’s model.¹⁵ A 1932 profile in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle even described him as a “Super Model,” saying, “He brings to the artist the power of character creation unequaled by any model in America.”¹⁶

Hunter sat for some of the most illustrious artists of the time. In 1925, when the renowned sculptor Daniel Chester French created a monumental war memorial, In Flanders Field, in Milton, Massachusetts, he used the eloquent template of Hunter’s black nude figure “for its magnificent proportions, adding a Caucasian head.”¹⁷ In addition, Hunter posed for illustrators J. C. Leyendecker, F. X. Leyendecker, and Charles Dana Gibson. He modeled at the Art Students League (where he sometimes lived), the Corcoran Art School, the Pratt Institute, the Yale School of Fine Arts, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Chief Williams likely crossed paths with Hunter in the Grand Central concourse, as the latter was heading to artist Ezra Winter’s studio in the art school upstairs. But the Chief’s daughter Gertrude more likely encountered Hunter uptown. Hunter fueled many of Harlem’s young colored set with modeling aspirations. At the close of 1929, Gertrude and Hunter were guests at the same New Year’s Eve party: she was by then likely too experienced to be starstruck, however the presence of a black model of Hunter’s caliber was not something a fashion plate like Gertrude would likely take for granted.

Though Hunter was not actually a Red Cap, he once briefly worked as a porter, and Chief Williams likely surmised that Jim Crow attitudes subjected the artist to the same fiscal uncertainty and hustle of those very uniformed porters he portrayed. Despite the model’s prolific output and his reputation as the consummate professional, Williams could readily glean from the papers that Hunter was pursuing his remarkable career without fair representation or compensation from his industry. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a porter or an elevator man,” the artist’s model once confessed wistfully. The sentiment was all too familiar to the Chief.¹⁸

Grand Central Terminal lay fairly dormant at night but roused itself with the early-morning arrival of sleeping car trains. Then between eight and nine o’clock its pulse quickened as trains arrived practically every minute on three of the four tracks in the Park Avenue tunnel. Waves of commuters poured out in quick succession onto the platforms and diverged in straggling columns up the ramps.

Some hastened through mazes of marble passages toward adjacent office or hotel buildings. Others redescended to reach subway lines, or exited the station to a taxi, bus, or trolley, or disappeared on foot onto the bustling sidewalks.

But at 9:40 the rush hour stilled itself, and a restive hush filled the cavernous temple of transportation, signaling the arrival of the 20th Century Limited. This train excited the New York Central men with singular adulation or an almost religious fervor. “To them it symbolizes their railroad,” wrote one observer. “Its arrival must be made an event of superlative ceremony.”¹⁹

It was a ceremony at which Chief Williams often officiated. At the blast of his whistle, the Red Caps would aggregate toward the Biltmore Room—a small waiting room known more descriptively as the “Kissing Gallery”—under the terminal’s Vanderbilt Avenue side. Lording over this room was the great arrivals blackboard, upon which a trainman wrote in bold white script with a stub of chalk. The Red Cap porters rushed in like secular acolytes, knowing they were needed, and fell into military files. Then they were marshaled in a body down a ramp to the platform where they would meet the incoming Century.

A character in Fannie Hurst’s 1921 novel Star-Dust describes “the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal” as she observes “the run of ‘red caps’ and the slow disgorging of passengers,” a scene soon followed by an uncle “struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of a ‘red cap,’” which soon culminated as “a ‘red cap,’ wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new leather cases.”²⁰ The scene, more literary than literal, described a basic truth: a Red Cap practically had to run if he hoped to make a buck.

While some contended that a porter’s thanks grew in accordance with the size of the tip, others saw it as less about venality than sustenance. “Their salaries are nominal. They live on the tips,” literary critic Burton Rascoe wrote, defending their honor in a syndicated column. “They are efficient, willing, courteous and genuinely helpful. Each one of them performs a hundred services a day for passengers, for which they get nothing. People, for some reason, who will give a half dollar to a cloak room attendant at a nightclub or hotel concession owned by a profitable syndicate, the head of which [is] a millionaire, often neglect to give even a dime to a red-cap for carrying their grips.”²¹

In a letter to New York Central president A. H. Smith, Mrs. S. R. Kaufman praised the Red Caps at Grand Central: “Chief Williams certainly has a gift in getting from his men what he wants, and a stranger would never suspect that he was ‘Chief,’ so willing to serve himself is he.”²²

One day in November 1926, word spread around Grand Central that Frances Heenan Browning was boarding the 7:49 for White Plains. Peaches Browning, as she was better known, was the teenage bride of “the rich but fatuous middle-aged New York realty broker,” Edward West “Daddy” Browning. The previous spring, when the sensational May-December newlyweds arrived in the city after their wedding, “Grand Central Station was packed to overflowing with men and women who craned necks to view them, screaming with excitement the while.”²³ The passing months had not abated the fascination, and the lapse in decorum was equally spectacular. From every recess of the station spilled “redcaps, gatemen, baggage hustlers, car cleaners and every unofficial [employee] who wasn’t tied to his work” to ogle the young woman. “It was a good wager that Mr. James Williams . . . was not around. For being a strict disciplinarian, he would not have countenanced such ill-mannered actions from his personnel.”²⁴

Indeed, Williams was not likely to make such a wager lightly, having to answer for lapses in his staff’s comportment. A rare reproof of the Chief appeared in the New York Age on November 2, 1929, when railroad news columnist James H. Hogans reported on a business traveler’s recently lost baggage. The passenger, detraining at Grand Central, had an important engagement with the head of his business firm. In the bag he carried were papers that were very necessary to the conference. The passenger arrived at six o’clock in the evening; the appointment was for seven o’clock, exactly an hour later. But it was nine o’clock before the traveler could transact his business because a fellow passenger took his bag.

Williams must have cringed to read this account in the newspaper. Though Hogans conceded that such mix-ups occurred frequently in all large railroad terminals, he pointed up the impossible conundrum: “the porter blames the redcap; the redcap faults the passenger, and the passenger reproaches both the redcap and the porter.” Unless timely action was undertaken to eradicating the problem—by a proactive collaboration between Chief Williams, his captains, and the [Pullman] porters—“someone is going to be affected by these constant complaints,” Hogans cautioned. “And, as every redcap and every porter knows, that someone is not going to be the railroads nor is it going to be the Pullman Company.”²⁵ If the public airing of this story in the black press stung, it likely hinted at how strongly the race generally felt implicated in the Chief’s predicament and invested in his success.

But Chief Williams more often seemed every bit the “Big Boss” as a newspaper photomontage dubbed him.²⁶ As a supervisor, he toted baggage far less frequently than did his three to five hundred men, however special passengers warranted his personal attention and drew him down to the tracks. One morning in 1927 as the 20th Century Limited from Chicago pulled into Grand Central amid the din of tunnel bells, he was standing with a telegram. The man he was waiting for soon stepped out of the sleeper: it was Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, who had wired in advance of his arrival. The two men greeted each other familiarly as “Al” and “Jim.” The writer John R. Tunis witnessed their warm reception. “No one else except the Chief was permitted or has been permitted for eighteen years to handle Al Smith’s baggage,” Tunis would later write. The sixty-some other Red Caps stationed down the platform gave due deference to “Al’s Red Cap.”²⁷

Many travelers on the 20th Century Limited began or ended a trip with Chief Williams as a frame of reference. Hailing him as “Chief,” “Jimmy,” or “Jim” or even just making a visual connection, mutual or one-sided, could feel essential to the traveling experience. “We make the first and last impression,” the Chief would say. That mindfulness had made him the favorite of such notables as former Vermont governor Edward Smith, heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Archbishop Patrick Joseph Hayes. “No Grand Central passenger can consider himself a big shot until Jim has personally met him,” Tunis said.²⁸

One young psychologist, who had paid for school thanks to working several seasons as a Pullman porter, recalled that a certain “grandiose” industrialist always called the Chief the day he meant to leave town. Williams duly made boarding preparations on the Century for the rich, hypochondriacal traveler (left unnamed), his constant valet, and his personal physician. For the day of the departure, the Chief cast several tall Red Caps—in a coup de théâtre that assured a big tip—to appear minutes before the train’s scheduled departure, giving the tycoon the “psychological moment” that he desired. “Then the Chief Red Cap would lead the procession to the train, on his arm reposing the overcoat of the famous captain of industry.”

The eight or so statuesque Red Caps followed single file behind Williams, this one carrying a bag, that one an umbrella, another a coat, all setting the stage for the pompous gentleman to fall in line behind them, trailed by his manservant and doctor. The already boarded passengers who saw this vignette through their windows were mystified as to who this man was, “so great that even the chief red cap, another exalted being, would deign to stoop and carry his coat.” They might have half expected (or hoped) the men to break out into an impromptu chorus of “The Charleston,” like the Red Caps who had introduced the song behind Elizabeth Welch on Broadway a few years before. After the men set down his luggage in the train’s stateroom, the famous industrialist made the charade worth their while, grandly flashing a wad of bills in front and giving “each red cap a new five-dollar note and the chief red cap a twenty-dollar note.”²⁹

However lucrative such indulgences might be, Chief Williams knew them to be worth more than coin. It heartened him that the former first lady, Edith Roosevelt, always contacted him personally from Oyster Bay before she left home. According to one magazine, “no subordinate is allowed to touch the bags of any member of the Roosevelt family if Williams knows anything about it.”³⁰

Earl Brown, the former baseball-playing Harvard student, recalled making such a gaffe as a novice Red Cap: he grabbed two elegant pieces of luggage from a Century Pullman porter, reasoning that their owner would certainly be good for a dollar tip. His hunch was right. He was content that the “stoutish woman” they belonged to gave him what he had guessed, until he’d done putting them all into a taxi: “As I turned to leave the scene I saw the Chief looking at me with a steely glint in his eye.”

“How come you so smart?” he asked Brown.

“What have I done? I didn’t do anything,” Brown said defensively.

“Well, that was Madame [Ernestine] Schumann-Heink, the great opera singer, and I had an appointment to meet her at the train. A fresh kid like you had to go and grab her bags of all others. Don’t be so fresh the next time.”

Brown regretted beating the Chief out of Madame Schumann-Heink’s usual ten-dollar tip, though admitted he was delighted in having “made a quick buck.”³¹

Chief Williams was a rigid disciplinarian, insisting that the Red Caps maintain their personal appearance meticulously. He made daily rounds to inspect them—“and woe to the culprit who is not up to the standard,” one let on.³²

In March 1927 The World, a newsmagazine, exalted the four living generations of the Williams family as a remarkable triumph over adversity in an article called “Up from Slavery,” echoing the famous title of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography. It spotlighted the family patriarch, the runaway slave John Wesley Williams; his son, the Chief of Grand Central Terminal’s Red Caps and consort of statesmen; his grandson Wesley, the first Negro in the city’s fire department—cited for acts of heroism, whose imminent promotion to lieutenant in September would make him the city’s first black fire officer of rank; and a fourth generation of great-grandchildren.³³

But in October a series of three articles purportedly penned “by a former Red Cap” equated Grand Central’s porters to mere slaves.³⁴ Allan S. A. Titley’s purported exposé, called “Slaves of Grand Central Terminal,” cited widespread dissatisfaction in the porters’ ranks. While he did not attack Williams personally, he seemed poised to take the esteemed Chief down a peg.

“Pure bunk,” Williams shot back, dismissing the claim as “propaganda on the part of some disgruntled person who . . . lost his job through his own machinations.” But was it merely this, or did Williams’s defensiveness reveal some naïveté? Titley’s argument—that the Red Caps’ unorganized state accounted for their unfortunate lot—was not preposterous. In fact, given the Red Caps’ job definition, it was even reasonable. Titley’s articles did not induce immediate dissent. But nor did they endear him to those who believed an outside organization was agitating to form a station porters union, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized two years before, that was at once cherished and controversial.