North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses the evolution of Jim Crow employment patterns in the Canadian railway industry from the 1880s to World War I. It presents race as acentral organizing principle in employers' decision to hire black railwaymen for their sleeping and dining car departments. Canadian railway managers actively sought out African American, West Indian, and African Canadian labour, believing that they constituted an easily manipulated group of workers. White railroaders fought the introduction of black employees, arguing that they undermined white manhood and railway unionism. Trade union leaders demanded and won a racialized division of the workforce, locking black workers into low-waged service position when they had initially enjoyed a broader range of employment options. In effect, white railway trade unionists and their employers embraced segregation as a rational model for peaceful working conditions. Black railroaders, on the other hand, resisted the encroachment of segregationist policies by forming their own union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters. They pressured for change by exposing the scope of Jim Crow practices in the railway industry and trade unionism. Resume Cet article analyse l'evolution des modeles d'emploi de Jim Crow dans l'industrie des chemins de fer canadiens des annees 1880 jusqu'a la Premiere Guerie Mondiale. Il presente la race comme un principe fondamental dans la decision des employeurs d'embaucher des travailleurs noirs pour les wagons-lits et les wagons-restaurants. Les chefs des chemins de fer canadiens recherchaient activement les Afro-Americains, les Antillais et les Afro-Canadiens, en pensant qu'ils faisaient partie d'un groupe de travailleurs faciles a manipuler. Les travailleurs blancs se sont battus contre l'embauche des employes noirs, en disant que ces derniers saperaient leur virilite et le syndicalisme aux chemins de fer. Les chefsdes syndicats ont demande et gagne une separation de la main-d'oeuvre selon larace, confinant les travailleurs noirs aux emplois peu remuneres alors qu'ils avaient initialement une gamme de possibilites d'emploi plus variee. En effet, les syndicalistes blancs et les employeurs ont soutenu la segregation comme modele rationnel des conditions de travail pacifiques. Les travailleurs noirs, en revanche, ont resiste aux politiques de segregation en formant leur propre syndicat, l'Ordre des travailleurs de wagons-lits. Ils ont fait des pressions pour obtenir des changements en rendant publiques les pratiques de Jim Crow dans l'industrie des chemins de fer et dans le mouvement syndical.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".