For most of a century, a Black man could work a Canadian passenger train for a lifetime and never be allowed to run it. Sleeping car porters made the beds, shined the shoes and carried the bags. The conductor, who held authority over the train and the crew, was a white man’s job. The story of how porters and their union challenged that line is one of the most concrete examples of workplace discrimination in Canadian history, and of the organizing that pushed back against it.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in its account of Black sleeping car porters, describes the work as the domain of Black men from the late 1800s to the mid-1950s. The Coquitlam Heritage Society at Mackin House writes that Black men were preferred for the job because of their history in domestic service, and that porters could not apply for the conductor’s position, which was historically reserved for white men.
The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that between 1916 and 1919 more than 500 Black porters came to Canada to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The pay was low. The CMHR notes that porters worked runs as long as 72 hours with no sleeping quarters, resting on folding seats in smoking rooms, and paid for items such as uniforms, shoe polish kits and meals out of their wages. Tips were an essential part of income.
A union before most workers had one
Porters organized early. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters was founded in Winnipeg in April 1917 by John A. Robinson, J.W. Barber, B.F. Jones and P. White, and is described there as the first Black railway union in North America. The CMHR reports that the CPR dismissed 36 porters for union activities in the early 1920s.
The Canadian Encyclopedia says porters gained membership in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union founded in the United States by A. Philip Randolph, in 1939, and that divisions formed in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg in 1942. In May 1945, the union signed its first collective agreement with the CPR. The Museum of Toronto calls it the first Black union in Canada to sign an agreement with a white employer. Among the gains the Canadian Encyclopedia lists are salary increases, overtime pay, the right to display name plaques in sleeping cars and fairer discipline. (Sources differ on the length of the paid vacation won, so this article does not give a figure.)
The conductor’s job
A contract improved the job. It did not change who was allowed to hold the better one. Both the Canadian Encyclopedia and the CMHR record that in 1953 the union filed a complaint under federal fair employment legislation, focused on conductor positions. The Coquitlam Heritage Society describes it as a complaint to the Department of Labour under the Canada Fair Employment Act of 1953, and the CMHR notes that conciliation began that year.
The result was a first. George V. Garraway became the first Black conductor on a Canadian railway. The date needs care. The Canadian Encyclopedia and the CMHR both place his hiring in 1954. The Museum of Toronto, however, cites a union press release dated April 30, 1955, which it quotes as saying that a fight to end the colour bar in employment on Canadian railroads had scored its first success. This article cannot settle the discrepancy from the sources reviewed. It may reflect the gap between a hiring and its public announcement, but that is an inference, not a documented fact. Readers who need the exact date should consult the railway and union records the museums draw on.
What the sources do agree on is the significance. The complaint targeted a specific, named barrier, and it was pursued through a law and a process available to the union, not through goodwill.
Beyond the rails
The same organizers pushed on a wider front. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Stanley G. Grizzle, who began as a CPR porter in June 1940 and was elected president of the Toronto CPR division of the Brotherhood in 1946, took part in April 1954 in what it calls the first delegation of Black Canadians to meet members of the federal Cabinet, on discriminatory immigration policies. The Toronto Star, in a 2019 piece by Cecil Foster drawing on his book They Call Me George, describes a 35-member delegation of current and former porters arriving in Ottawa in April 1954. (The Encyclopedia gives April 27 for the meeting, and the Star piece gives April 26 for the arrival.) The Museum of Toronto credits Donald Moore with founding the Negro Citizenship Association in 1951.
Grizzle went on to become, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the first Black Canadian citizenship judge, and was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1995.
What the record does not say
The material reviewed for this article does not include the text of the 1953 complaint, the railways’ response, or the details of the conciliation. Those would be the most valuable documents for a fuller account, and they are not summarized in the museum and encyclopedia sources cited here. Nor does it establish how many Black conductors followed Garraway, or how quickly.
Even so, the outline is clear and documented by several established institutions. A workforce was hired for a role because of race, held there because of race, and organized itself across nearly four decades to challenge both. The fight for the conductor’s job was one part of a longer argument about who belongs in Canadian working life.
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Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia (“Sleeping Car Porters in Canada”; “Stanley G. Grizzle”); Canadian Museum for Human Rights (“Black sleeping car porters”); Museum of Toronto (“The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters”; “George Garraway”); Coquitlam Heritage at Mackin House (“Black Train Porters on the Canadian Railway”); Toronto Star, 2019, via cecilfoster.ca.
