George Mortimer Pullman was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it. This ultimately led to the Pullman Strike due to the high rent prices charged for company housing and low wages paid by the Pullman Company. His Pullman Company also hired African-American men to staff the Pullman cars, known as Pullman porters, who provided elite service and were compensated only in tips.
Asa Philip Randolph was an American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union. In the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement, Randolph was a prominent voice. His continuous agitation with the support of fellow labor rights activists against racist unfair labor practices, eventually helped lead President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II. The group then successfully maintained pressure, so that President Harry S. Truman, proposed a new Civil Rights Act, and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948, promoting fair employment, anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring, and ending racial segregation in the armed services.
The Pullman Company, founded by George Pullman, was a manufacturer of railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Through rapid late-19th century development of mass production and takeover of rivals, the company developed a virtual monopoly on production and ownership of sleeper cars. During a severe economic downturn, the 1894 Pullman Strike by company workers proved a transforming moment in American labor history. At the company's peak in the early 20th century, its cars accommodated 26 million people a year, and it in effect operated "the largest hotel in the world". Its production workers initially lived in a planned worker community named Pullman, Chicago.
Founded in 1925, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The BSCP gathered a membership of 18,000 passenger railway workers across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Beginning after the American Civil War, the job of Pullman porter had become an important means of work in the black community in the United States. As a result of a decline in railway transportation in the 1960s, BSCP membership declined. It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC), now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.
Pullman porters were men hired to work on the railroads as porters on sleeping cars. Starting shortly after the American Civil War, George Pullman sought out former slaves to work on his sleeper cars. Their job was to carry passengers’ baggage, shine shoes, set up and maintain the sleeping berths, and serve passengers. Pullman porters served American railroads from the late 1860s until the Pullman Company ceased operations on December 31, 1968, though some sleeping-car porters continued working on cars operated by the railroads themselves and, beginning in 1971, Amtrak. The term "porter" has been superseded in modern American usage by "sleeping car attendant", with the former term being considered "somewhat derogatory".
Barbara Kopple is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work.
Independent Lens is a weekly television series airing on PBS featuring documentary films made by independent filmmakers. Past seasons of Independent Lens were hosted by Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Susan Sarandon, Edie Falco, Terrence Howard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, America Ferrera, Mary-Louise Parker, and Stanley Tucci, who served two stints as host from 2012-2014.
Lawrence Konner is an American screenwriter, producer and film director. Konner has written over twenty-five feature films, including Mona Lisa Smile, Planet of the Apes, The Legend of Billie Jean, The Jewel of the Nile, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Konner’s writing for television spans over forty-five years. His works include the HBO series The Sopranos, for which Konner earned an Emmy nomination in 2001, and Boardwalk Empire, for which he received the WGA Award for Best New Series in 2010. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work as writer and executive producer on the 2016 miniseries Roots. Other television credits include Family and Little House on the Prairie.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company, The Story Syndicate.
Robert Stone is a British-American documentary filmmaker. His work has been screened at dozens of film festivals and televised around the world, notably seven of his films have appeared on PBS's American Experience series and four of his films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is an Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary and a three-time Emmy nominee for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
The Road Taken is a 1996 documentary about the experiences of Black Canadian sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada's railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s.
Jack Santino, Ph.D. is an academic folklorist.
Freedom Riders is a 2010 American historical documentary film, produced by Firelight Media for PBS American Experience. The film is based in part on the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by historian Raymond Arsenault. Directed by Stanley Nelson, it marked the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride in May 1961 and first aired on May 16, 2011. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film was also featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show program titled, Freedom Riders: 50th Anniversary. Nelson was helped in the making of the documentary by Arsenault and Derek Catsam, an associate professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
Daniel Junge is an American documentary filmmaker. On February 26, 2012, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the film Saving Face, which he co-directed along with Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Tod Lending is an American producer, director, writer and cinematographer. His work has aired on ABC, PBS, HBO, Al Jazeera English, CNN, A&E; has been screened theatrically and awarded at national and international festivals; and has been televised internationally in Europe and Asia. He is the president and founder of Nomadic Pictures, a documentary film production company based in Chicago, and the Executive Director of Ethno Pictures, a nonprofit film company that produces and distributes educational films.
Connie Field is a director of documentary features.
The Last Pullman Car is a 1983 feature-length documentary film produced by Kartemquin Films. The film focuses on the conflict between labor unions and corporations, and was created during a time in the company's history when its directors were making industrial for-hire films to support their social-issue, union-focused documentaries.
Rosina Tucker was an American labor organizer, civil rights activist, and educator. She is best known for helping to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American trade union. At the age of one hundred, Tucker narrated a documentary about the union, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle.
Julia Reichert is an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and feminist.
Natalia Denegri producer and writer, residing in Miami, United States. She began her career as an actress and host in Argentina, where she participated in TV shows, plays and a radio program. In the United States, she has won 22 Emmy Awards. She obtained the first one in 2015 together with host Nelson Bustamante and producer Elizabeth Hernández for her documentary Doble Exilio Part 2 in the News & Documentary category.
