Black porters in Montreal leave legacy of labour rights after enduring low wages, racism

As a child, Marlene Jennings had to stay quiet whenever her father, Preston Jennings Sr., was resting.

His work as a Canadian Pacific Railway porter could keep him away from home for 14 days at a time.

"We all remember seeing our dad seated at the kitchen table with newspapers on the floor and he was shining his shoes, getting ready to go to work," Jennings, who was a longtime federal MP, said. "It was only when I got older I understood the nature of his work and why he was so sleep deprived."

It's a little known history, but Jennings Sr. — who was born outside Birmingham, Ala., in 1914 — shares a similar immigration story with many patriarchs in Montreal's Black community of the early 20th century.

Through a new television series, more Canadians will be introduced to the sacrifices and contributions made by Black porters.

The CBC and BET drama series The Porter, premiering on Monday, features the history of the primarily Black sleeping car porters in the 1920s, attending to railway passengers who were mostly white.

Porters were notoriously underpaid and overworked, and they regularly faced racism from travellers.

"Their tips were dependent on the passenger," Jennings said. "If they were subject to racism ... they couldn't respond because not only would they not get a tip, but they would also get reprimanded and possibly get fired from their job."

Despite the gruelling work, Jennings Sr. found the energy to play an active role in his union and in Montreal's Union United Church, like many of his contemporaries.

Black porters have a history of community organizing. When they were kept out of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees — the most prominent union for railway workers at the time — they formed the Order of Sleeping Car Porters in 1917, the first Black labour union in North America. They also lobbied for fair employment practices and immigration policies to benefit all Canadians.

Catherine Tolbart used to photograph porters staying in Montreal when they visited famed jazz club Rockhead's Paradise. That's how she met her former partner, porter Ensley Gabriel, and started a family with him.

"They all liked him in the club. He used to play guitar," she said.

"A lot of [porters] wanted to have their picture taken with me to keep as souvenirs.... They were gentlemen, and they weren't brazen. They treated you with respect."

Many of the porters were hired precisely because they were educated and expected to hold conversations with privileged white customers.

"They could have intelligent conversations with Black porters about anything from Plato to economics ... but they weren't going to pay for that premium," historian Dorothy Williams, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, said.

Confronting erasure

Williams, who served as a historical consultant for The Porter, says it's encouraging to see the dramatization of Black histories, but current curricula don't present Black people's actions as integral to the Canadian narrative.

"I grew up with most people thinking Blacks came here only in the 1960s, so totally oblivious to hundreds of years of history here," she said.

The reason so few people know about Black porters' struggle for labour rights and their overall contributions to Canadian history, Jennings said, is because Canadian history is Eurocentric.

"A lot of the values that we hold today are the values they were espousing, and it's only now that's starting to become part of the common discourse," she said.

"I'm sure there's going to be a host of Black people, descendants of porters, who are going to be appropriating the different histories [in The Porter] as part of their own."

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.