Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal

Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, by Eric K. Washington (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019).

If you are nostalgic for the grand days of rail travel, you need to read this book.  If you have been pondering the prevalence of systemic racism in American society, you also need to read this book.  Boss of the Grips will tell you a great deal about the life of James H. Williams, chief of the red-capped baggage carriers in Grand Central Terminal from 1909 until his death in 1948.  However, this book is much more than the biography of one man or the story of one occupation.  Eric Washington explores the ways that the splendor and spectacle of Grand Central Terminal as a destination– and even the performance of glamourous life in New York City itself– depended upon what he labels “the servitude of African American workers.”

James Williams was not a trade unionist. He was a supervisor with the power to hire. In 1903 he was the first African-American man to be hired as an attendant at Grand Central Terminal.  By 1909, the Terminal’s management had decided to transform the occupation from an all-white workforce designed to provide information to travelers, to a majority African- American workforce whose duties were doubled to include carrying luggage, or “grips,” as they were commonly called.  Williams presided over this workforce for 37 years.  

By hiring African-American men, Washington notes, both the Terminal and the railroads enhanced their public image.  The men were attired in smart uniforms and red caps.  The “Red Caps,” easily recognizable by their headwear and skin color, offered travelers a combination of service and deference, bringing order to the formerly somewhat chaotic conditions surrounding the arrival and departure of trains at the Terminal. Red Caps were not paid by the Terminal but were trained to offer travel information and as well as manual labor in exchange for tips. 

Surprisingly, Washington begins the book with a description of New York City during the years of Reconstruction following the Civil War, from 1873-1909.  The reader who is eager to read about 20th century train travel may be tempted to skip these first 100 pages.  Don’t.  Washington tells a long back story of the New York City hospitality industry relevant to the reasons African- American men were selected as the group to be Red Caps.  For those who do not know the history of free Blacks in New York, this book reveals how long and how hard the hope of equality has existed, and how often that hope has been betrayed.

Washington begins by tracing the work of the Williams family in New York from the end of the Civil War, when the population of New York City included African-American artists, intellectuals, artisans, physicians and small business owners, ready to take their place as equal citizens in New York City and State.  He illustrates how anti-black sentiment and employment opportunities for newly arriving migrants from the former Confederacy narrowed as New York City increased as a site of luxury and wealth. 

 

In 1873, light-skinned, educated freed people of color expected that their education and social position would be useful in building a new life outside the South.  Instead, they found that they were expected to become servants to wealthy white people, including the not- so-wealthy who wanted to consume luxury through hotels and restaurants in the growing “hospitality industry” of the Gilded Age.  In this first section, Washington illustrates how Manhattan society grew to imitate the newly-defeated Southern plantation society by employing African Americans as servants.

Railroads, hotels, and restaurants catering to the newly rich in Manhattan created ever-more extravagant venues and products whereby people could display their wealth.  African-American servants, waiters, and coachmen became stylish commodities among the very wealthy.  White employers could hire black people for these positions and thereby demonstrate their prestige and add value to their businesses and services.

The Williams family, whose members had both education and light skin, were forced by both prejudice and economic necessity to join the ranks of servants. Williams’ father, a former slave who had been a waiter in Norfolk, Virginia, became a waiter at the sophisticated Sturtevant House hotel at Broadway and 29th Street in Manhattan. James himself worked as a teenager for florist Charles F. Thorley, whose business catered to the wealthy, and whose African-American employees added glamour to his enterprise. Washington speculates that this job helped James Williams to learn the behaviors that would serve him well as Chief of the Red Caps at Grand Central: tact, patience and deference, traits that Williams also learned to use to his own advantage as one who aspired to help himself, his family, and other African Americans strive for upward social and economic mobility.

Washington describes the irony of the black population’s ability to gain upward mobility through subservient behavior by following the family’s moves from the “black belt” streets of lower Manhattan, where the grandparents and parents of James Williams lived and worked, to Harlem. He also emphasizes that for African Americans, these moves were not choices, but defensive relocations in response to racial violence.  Author Washington’s skill as a professional New York City tour guide brings these neighborhood descriptions to life, and his research, conducted through the Community Scholars program at Columbia University, makes you want to jump on the subway and visit each location, from Greenwich Village to Harlem. I hope the next edition will come with a map, but you can do a decent armchair tour with Google maps on your computer.  

While this is very much a story about work, there is little information about wages, hours and working conditions found in a traditional study of labor history. Instead, Washington focuses on what can be accomplished by a family, community and “race” when someone is able to earn money, and how periods of economic contraction impacted the ability of African Americans to flourish.  His one chapter on unionization is titled “Organized Labor Pains,” and it offers a telling example of why a traditional trade union contract does not always benefit workers who rely on tips for their living.

Red Caps worked for tips until the 1940s.  Some, including Williams, learned that catering to the egos of travelers as well as their needs could bring a higher reward.   Malcom X, who as a teenager in the 1940s, sold sandwiches on the Yankee Clipper train between Boston and New York, put it this way: “We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.” (Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965, p. 78). 

James Williams was no Malcolm X, and he understood the importance of catering to the egos of his clients.  In this portrait, Eric Washington presents James Williams as a New York power broker:  a light-skinned black man who was able to use his position as chief porter to hire and help other African Americans on their road to economic independence.  Even though Williams and his fellow workers had to engage in servile behavior and backbreaking labor to earn their living, Washington’s book is filled with anecdotes that illustrate that for some, the job was fun and challenging, and their association with Grand Central Terminal provided a path to other careers.

 

Williams himself aspired to and lived a middle-class life style in Harlem.  He socialized with the rich and powerful African-American community, was a member and officer of fraternal and social organizations, and he raised significant amounts of money for the fledgling NAACP. He hired athletes, musicians and dancers as Red Caps to participate in teams and ensembles sponsored by Grand Central Terminal, and he was able to use their performances to raise money to help uplift the black race.  Washington even provides links to YouTube videos of several performances.

This biography chronicles many incidents of overt racism in Williams’ life and times that pushed against social and civil equality. Williams was among those who chose to resist racial oppression by working to create a separate world for African Americans rather than fight for equality in a socially integrated setting.

Although Williams was well known for his position as the Chief of the Red Caps at Grand Central and had been interviewed in the press many times in that capacity, he left little personal record of his thoughts and feelings.  To tell his story fully, Washington mines the society pages of the African-American press, city directories, census records, and a host of other publicly available sources to locate Williams and his family members in the community of African Americans who settled in Harlem in the 1920s.  He uses these sources with no hesitation, although others have been critical of the African-American press and its role in inflating the influence of the African-American middle class (Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 1957). As a supervisory employee, Williams never gave comments on labor issues for the press. He seemingly managed to live well from his tips and wages.  It would have been interesting to see what the records of Grand Central Terminal might contain about the red caps and their work relations.

There are other questions that linger:  who really employed the Red Caps?  They worked at Grand Central Terminal, but they worked for tips from passengers.  Even when they voted to join a union, the contract negotiated raised this question.  As Washington notes, even Eleanor Roosevelt asked in 1940, “should the expense for carrying handbags rightly be borne by their owners, or by the porters, or by those who run the railroads?”  It is a question that still has no satisfactory answer. (Jayaraman, Forked, 2016; Segrave, Tipping, 1998; Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, 2001), but that is not the purpose of Boss of the Grips, which has as its main goal the celebration of the dignity of a man’s life and his impact on a culture.

Reviewed by labor historian and adult educator Janet Wells Greene, co-founder and Board Member Emerita of The Freedom School in Licking County, Ohio. Before she retired in 2009, she was a member of the faculty of the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College, Historian and Director of the Library of The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York and Director of the Harry Van Arsdale Labor Documentation Project of the Wagner Labor Archives/Tamiment Library at New York University. She was a founding faculty member of The Southern Appalachian Labor School in West Virginia and was Co-Director of Development of the Highlander Center for Research and Education in Tennessee.