C. L. Dellums

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.

Dellums worked as a porter for the Pullman Company 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 Branch Office in Berkeley, California.

Born in Corsicana, Texas, he was the uncle of Ron Dellums, a former congressman and mayor of Oakland.

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.

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. 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.”

A statue of C.L. Dellums at the Amtrak station in Jack London Square in Oakland, California