New York City’s Grand Central Terminal is a rightly celebrated tour de force that has captivated the traveling public for more than a century. Opened on February 2, 1913, the world’s largest railroad station was built by the American firms Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore. It showcases a host of such artistic talents as Jules-Félix Coutan, whose monumental sculpture of Hercules, Mercury, and Minerva above a Tiffany clock crowns the building’s entry; and Paul César Helleu and Charles Basing, whose cerulean painted ceiling transports a mind-wandering traveler to the blue heavens. Many regarded it as the “finest example of Beaux-Arts civic planning in New York,”1 at once an architectural confection and a masterwork of innovative design and engineering. Yet the sublimeness of Grand Central Terminal’s Tennessee pink marble concourses, its cascading ramps and stairs and opulent shadows, belies its once-essential operating model: the servitude of African-American workers.
The servitude in this case was rooted in the American tradition of racial exploitation. Northerners might have comfortably regarded their territory as a historically enlightened refuge from the harsh segregation practices of the South, or of a bygone era. However, twentieth-century New York City had ample evidence of its own Jim Crow policies—notably at Grand Central. The station’s tightly run system deployed a singular corps of black men in red caps as baggage porters—“Red Caps,” as they were popularly known—who at times numbered in the several hundreds. Travelers routinely hailed one of the ubiquitous wearers of red caps and put the porter through his paces. Or a porter, seeing no gain in being invisible, readily volunteered himself to unburden a traveler’s grip. “The nature of a porter’s work,” the noted writer E. B. White observed in The New Yorker, “tends to put him in a class with beasts of burden.”2 Indeed, throughout the bustling concourses, a porter’s often backbreaking and demeaning labor was integral both to the station’s functional efficiency and to its glamorous ambience. It was perhaps inevitable that Grand Central’s Red Cap porter system became the model for numerous railroad stations across the nation.
Made categorically identifiable both by their apparel and by their complexion, the black workforce at Grand Central embodied America’s color line—the laws, bylaws, amendments, and social attitudes that closed doors to blacks. His travels through Europe had convinced Frederick Douglass by the 1880s that racial prejudice was “purely an American feeling” and did not innately belong to the broader white race. In the United States, the color line was a deep-seated cultural contrivance that had festered for generations. It was a panoply of contradictions. At times one felt its prohibitions only intuitively, yet they were as palpable as a taut rope. It could be woven into the collective subconscious by social mores or by deliberate legislative acts. But blacks also found ways to circumvent and mitigate impasses created when whites erected the color line: they bent and reconfigured it into opportunities and positions of leverage. Such was the case at Grand Central, where the color line afforded black workers the means, proverbially speaking, to make a way out of no way.
Indeed, “redcapping” flourished as one of the most iconic service occupations of the last century. It originated at Grand Central Depot in 1895 with a dozen white staff but had become exclusively black by 1905. A source of pride, the job was coveted by, and almost invariably associated with, African-American men. Whereas educated whites shunned the work as too low in status, educated blacks recognized it as a rare and propitious employment option in an era of rigid racial barriers. At Grand Central, African-American college students undertook redcapping as a means to pay their way through school. The man who created this opportunity for securing a foothold toward professional and social advancement was James H. Williams, a singular individual whose history at Grand Central Terminal is steeped in urban legend and the mythology of the landmark we know today.
Born to formerly enslaved African-American parents in 1878, Williams broke the color line of Grand Central’s white Red Cap attendants in 1903. Upon Williams’s hire, the former public reminder that attendants “are not porters,” to carry baggage—but rather were on hand to assist station passengers—began taking on a new definition. Starting in 1909, Williams served as the chief attendant (or chief porter, or chief red cap) of Grand Central Terminal—its first and most notable African-American officer—and remained in that position until his death in 1948. In this capacity, he embodied a unique juncture between black and white America. His influential forty-five-year tenure made the monumental railroad station not only a gateway to America’s greatest city but, just as much, a gateway to the nation’s greatest African-American neighborhood: Harlem. For nearly half a century, Chief Williams supervised a staff of men who were relegated by dint of race to the lowest stratum of the station’s workforce, though their role was integral to the railroad system. Like their rail-roaming kin, the sleeping car (or Pullman) porters—who were also African-American—the station-bound Red Caps were crucial to the Swiss-watch precision of the terminal and woven into the beguiling experience of early twentieth-century railroad travel.
Williams’s life coincided with key periods in the evolving social and cultural world of African Americans living in the ever-changing metropolis of New York City. His experiences offer a window on post–Civil War America and the heady optimism of the Reconstruction era, a period that obliged the Williams family and their kind to discover strategies to sidestep financial dependency and social stigmatization in order to achieve some form of self-reliance. We follow Williams as a “race” man: he was an active, if unassuming, agent of the early twentieth-century ideological cause of “racial uplift”—which strove to quell white prejudice through black self-improvement in education, business, labor, civic interest, and the arts—that in the 1920s would fuel the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance. And we follow him through two world wars, whose veterans from his earlier Red Cap workforce at Grand Central acquire greater resolve to surmount the racial bigotry on their home front.
It was Williams who redirected this historic labor force of railroad station porters, ingeniously transforming an outwardly self-abasing job into a coveted employment opportunity, be it interim, permanent, or moonlight. As the New York Herald Tribune would observe, Williams’s chiefdom ushered scores of promising but fiscally strapped young black college men on “their way to a mortarboard by working under a red cap”3 as luggage porters. Many of them were Greek-lettered men, a prime example of the countless social networks that blacks formed for themselves when they were categorically barred as personae non gratae from white fraternities and other private white institutions. Their academic credentials notwithstanding, these black “Greeks” as well as their unschooled “brothers of the race” worked as unsalaried laborers. They were ubiquitous throughout the terminal’s opulent Beaux-Arts concourses, heaving trunks and valises, tucked with satchels and pets, and toting the golf clubs and hatboxes of bustling travelers whom they depended upon for tips.
James H. Williams’s story reveals the qualities that ultimately positioned him and his legion of Red Caps as iconic cultural touchstones both of the Grand Central Terminal and of the Harlem community. While his story is obviously about race and labor, it is also overwhelmingly about personal industry, resourcefulness, and philanthropy. Over the course of his life, America roiled under some of the most seismic shifts in its history; the country’s ever-changing social and political landscape shaped Williams into a remarkably complex man, at once a management functionary and a community hero.
As a New York Central Railroad employee, he ushered statesmen, movie stars, society elite, sports heroes, high clergy, and other notables to and from trains with marginal visibility. But he stood out conspicuously among African Americans as “the Chief,” who created a platform to employ black men, to sustain black students, and to showcase the race in the most admirable light. In this capacity as the “boss of the grips” (grips being a term applied to both baggage and handlers), he was part of the central nervous system of the Harlem Renaissance, the storied era—from about the end of World War I through the mid-1930s—of Harlem’s cultural, literary, and artistic expression. There was also a renaissance of vibrant business and industry as ancillary “race” enterprises, as well as inspirited African-American labor and civic movements in which Chief Williams was noted.
Some clarification may be needed as to how a porter may count as a professional—James Williams was, after all, not a banker, doctor, or priest. His responsibilities at Grand Central were more those of a general factotum: his executive duties, variously operational and diplomatic, included hiring, training, assigning, and supervising some five hundred men. “We make the first and last impression upon the patrons of the railroad we serve,” he emphasized to his workforce. The sports author John R. Tunis concurred, observing that “the railroad red cap comes into contact with nearly all the famous people of his time, from Queens and Princes down.”4 Numerous profiles of Williams (from about 1909 to 1948) attest to his legendary sagacity and tact, which earned him acknowledgment from blacks and whites alike as “the Chief.” The title was as affectionate as it was deferential, and it frequently opened doors that were traditionally closed to African Americans.
But while Harlemites admired him as a forthright advocate and power broker for their community, Williams genuinely touched others, too. The day after he died, the journalist Earl Brown had to go to Chicago, so headed down to Grand Central for a ticket on the 20th Century Limited. For many, boarding that crack New York-to-Chicago train—which the New York Central advertised as “The Most Famous Train in the World”—anticipated the sight of Chief Williams at the gate. On the main concourse, Brown ran into some old-time friends, seasoned grips he knew from when he’d redcapped for a summer away from school. The vast majority of passengers weren’t going to Chicago, didn’t know about Williams’s death, and did not miss a step. But Brown, and maybe some of the ’Caps, saw a couple of strangers: “Two old white passengers, friends of the Chief, said they had read about his death in the morning paper. They were crying.”5
Who was this black man whose passing elicited grief among both friends and strangers? Indeed, tracing the life of James H. Williams is a dogged but fascinating task. The unobtrusive nature of his job rendered him nearly ephemeral—but not invisible. Though he was not a man of letters, in the letters and observations of others, and in the chronicles of his times, he takes shape, fleshes out, and breathes.