The First Black-Led Union Wouldn't Have Existed Without This Woman

Rosina Corrothers Tucker was born in 1881 in Washington, D.C. She married a preacher, and might have lived a quiet life, except the preacher died, and when she remarried it was to a man whose job put the couple in just the right place and time to make history.

Rosina’s husband Berthea Tucker was a Pullman porter. In the 1920s, the Pullman Palace Car Company was the nation’s largest single employer of black men. Pullman porters formed the first black-led union to be formally recognized by the American Federation of Labor, and eventually led the charge on civil rights — and Rosina Tucker became one of the most influential female labor and civil rights organizers in American history.

George Pullman started the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1862. He was a pioneer in vertical integration: he not only built the cars but operated them. And he brought the same approach to personnel matters, building and maintaining a company town in Illinois for his workers to live in and company stores for them to buy from.

His business was a massive success, but its profit model relied largely on cutting labor costs, which led to widespread worker dissatisfaction. Sometimes he even neglected to pay his workers enough to afford rent on properties of which he himself was the landlord. In the 1890s, nearly starving after a round of wage cuts, Pullman workers staged a massive strike that rocked the city of Chicago. Protests were chaotic, and federal troops were called in to violently suppress the strikers. Other workers across the country went on strike in solidarity with the Pullman workers, and the labor stoppage and property damage cost Pullman a fortune.

https://timeline.com/rosina-tucker-pullman-porters-37ba63c2b9eb