Cottrell Laurence Dellums (January 3, 1900 – December 6, 1989) was an American labor activist and one of the organizers and leaders of the

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Founded in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (commonly referred to as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, BSCP) was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation o ...

. Dellums worked as a porter for the

Pullman Company The Pullman Company, founded by George Pullman, was a manufacturer of railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Through rapid late-19th century d ...

from 1924 to 1927 and was discharged in part due to his open support of unionization. In 1929, Dellums was elected a vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and became president in 1968. In the 1930s, Dellums was an officer in the

NAACP The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is an American civil rights organization formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du&nbs ...

Branch Office in Berkeley, California. Born in

Corsicana, Texas Corsicana is a city in and the county seat of Navarro County, Texas, United States. It is located on Interstate 45, 50 miles southeast of Dallas, Texas, Dallas. Its population was 25,109 at the 2020 census. Corsicana is considered an important ...

, he was the uncle of

Ron Dellums Ronald Vernie Dellums (November 24, 1935 – July 30, 2018) was an American politician who served as Mayor of Oakland from 2007 to 2011. He had previously served thirteen terms as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California ...

, a former congressman and

mayor of Oakland The city of Oakland, California, was founded in 1852 and incorporated in 1854. The city uses a strong mayor form of government. Until the early 20th century, all Oakland mayors served terms of only one or two years each. Oakland mayors now serv ...

Before and during Sleeping Car Porters

Dellums “had chosen San Francisco as the most ideal place for a Negro to live in 1923.” Dellums also stated that the Bay Area's colleges and professional schools were an important attraction: "I wanted to be a lawyer and the University of California had the best law school.” Instead, however, Dellums went to work for the Southern Pacific railroad as a Pullman porter, where he gained the respect of his black coworkers and was ultimately elected International President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Dellums became the standard bearer of a growing African American labor movement in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco in the aftermath of the war. As Dellums would later explain, “Negroes will have to pay for their own organization, their own fights, by their own funds as well as their own energy.” Dellums's Brotherhood and other Black railroad workers unions were built with “Negro leadership and Negro money” using the solidarity forged within sites of segregation to wage direct confrontations against racial discrimination.HoSang, Daniel. ''Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California''. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2010. Print. The union also became known for its social activism beyond the world of train porters. For many years, Dellums tackled such issues as police brutality and the miserable conditions in which black agricultural workers existed. Dellums played a leading role in launching the Oakland Voters League (OVL) in the mid-1940s. This labor-civil rights coalition temporarily wrestled control of the Oakland City Council from the conservative Republican bloc that had dominated city politics for many years. Dellums with the OVL, drew their strength from building an organization and a new notion of political community among the city's multiracial working class.

Fair Employment Practices Committee

A. Philip Randolph Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was an American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American-led labor union. In the ...

and Dellums were instrumental in opening war industries to African Americans by threatening a massive “March on Washington” if Roosevelt did not respond to black pleas for nondiscriminatory hiring in war industries. In response, Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing a

Fair Employment Practice Committee The Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) was created in 1941 in the United States to implement Executive Order 8802 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "banning discriminatory employment practices by Federal agencies and all unions and com ...

(FEPC), which urged that defense plants be opened to African Americans. Not all labor officials who favored fair employment laws supported putting the FEPC question on the ballot. Dellums opposed placing the question before voters. He later said:

“We should never set a precedent that we recognize that the people have a right to vote on anything they want to vote on. The rights I have been fighting for all my life, they are now called civil rights, I call human rights, God-given rights. White people have been using their majority and their control of the law enforcing agencies and firearms to prevent us from exercising our God-given rights…. We were never really asking white people to grant or give us any rights. Only to stop using their majority and power in preventing us from exercising our God-given rights.”

Dellums would play a leading role in the subsequent fourteen-year effort to win approval of the FEPC measure within the state legislature, and he was eventually appointed by Governor Pat Brown to serve on the state's first Fair Employment Practices commission in 1960. In 1964, Dellums and the California Fair Employment Practices Commission published “A Report on Oakland Schools” that provided a window into the structural problems within the district as a result of hiring discrimination being one of the biggest obstacles to making the

Oakland Unified School District Oakland Unified School District is a public education school district that operates a total of 80 elementary schools (TK–5), middle schools (6–8), and high schools (9–12). There are also 28 district-authorized charter schools in Oakland, ...

receptive to its growing black student body.Murch, Donna Jean. ''Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print. Pg 55

References

External links

Conversation With Ron Dellums
*Dellums, C. L.,
International President of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and civil rights leader : oral history transcript / and related material, 1970-1973
', University of California Libraries, 2006. {{DEFAULTSORT:Dellums, C. L. African-American trade unionists American people in rail transportation 1900 births 1989 deaths People from Corsicana, Texas Activists from Oakland, California Trade unionists from Texas Trade unionists from California Dellums family 20th-century African-American people Vice presidents of the AFL-CIO