The struggle for the history of class struggle

At a time when history is contested, some figures are more hidden than others.

One of street battles between workers and the National Guard in 1877.

Last year, visual artist Hebru Brantley opened a pop-up art installation called Nevermore Park in Chicago.

The 6,000-square-foot display was billed as an “immersive art experience,” one that featured his cartoonish Flyboy character, as well as hidden figures from history. In one room, for instance, Tuskegee Airmen patches hung in a stylized mechanic’s garage, and in another, a vintage Chicago train car was filled with memorabilia of Pullman porters.

To shine a light on Black history is admirable and necessary, but I couldn’t help but also think about the pieces of history that were missing. Specifically, Nevermore Park was located in a warehouse across the street from the 16th Street viaduct in Pilsen, a historically working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side. At this exact spot in 1877, the police and militias fired at thousands of striking workers and supporters who'd gathered on Halsted Street near the bridge, killing several of them. Over a three-day period, 30 Chicagoans were killed during America’s bloody first-ever nationwide strike, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. 

I wrote about the Battle of the Viaduct in detail for Chicago Magazine last year and it landed with a thud. The editors weren’t interested in publishing it in print and no one but a few labor history wonks read the online version. It’s little surprise that in the year and a half since that story was published, there is still no plaque or any sign anywhere that indicates that the Battle of the Viaduct ever took place and I bet more than 99 out of 100 Chicagoans would give you blank looks if you asked about it. 

It’s not as if people aren’t interested in the past. Far from it, we’re living in a time in which history is more unsettled than usual, it’s constantly being reimagined and recontextualized. The 1619 Project—which was just published in book form—is being canonized in some circles and demonized in others. Confederate statues are increasingly coming down while icons of Indigenous and Black Americans are going up. In Chicago, racial justice protests targetted the city’s three Christopher Columbus statues, which Mayor Lori Lightfoot removed last July. In October, the city renamed Lake Shore Drive for Jean-Baptiste DuSable, the Black man credited as the first permanent settler of Chicago. Forty other monuments deemed problematic are still being evaluated by the Chicago Monuments Project. 

Meanwhile, the literal class warfare that raged throughout much of the late 19th and early 20th century remains obscured, an issue I wrote about for Arc Digital last week. Cities like Chicago are filled with the rich legacy of labor and class struggles as well but it’s hard to find mention of any of it. Tourists ride buses in search of local ghosts, or mafiosos, or good architecture but a labor tour would be something of a waste. The single Haymarket monument on Desplaines Street is a faceless muddle, counterbalanced by a police statue at the Police Training Center.

And while I’m glad that the newly christened Pullman National Monument exists, the message imparted there has been watered down; it’s typically something non-specific about civil rights, the creation of the Black middle class, or even just bland self-empowerment. The battle between workers and the Pullman Company—one that ended with 26 civilians killed in the weeks-long mayhem in 1894—has been nudged to the side. So too, is the fact that Pullman wasn’t one of the largest employers of Black men after the Civil War because he was woke, he did so because he thought ex-slaves would better know how to best how to cater to customers’ every whim and do so for cheaper wages.

Even with the iconic A. Philip Randolph as their leader, it took 12 long years for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first all-Black union, to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company after it was organized. In the meantime, the BSCP endured threats from the company such as job loss and harassment.

Those particulars of the workers’ collective struggle against the wealthy capitalists that exploited them have been sanitized. To wit, take the poster that the National Park Foundation and Union Pacific commissioned for display in the new visitor center. It’s a vintage-style travel poster depicting several Black porters proudly standing in front of a Pullman sleeper car, with the factory administration gleaming in the background.

“For me and a lot of people in the Black community, we see Pullman porters as a symbol of Black men who were able to pull themselves and their families out of hardships,” said a Union Pacific executive quoted in a press release.  That’s nice, but there’s no mention of how exactly those men pulled themselves by their bootstraps. It wasn’t by asking their bosses nicely.

I don’t blame a PR flak for missing the bigger picture or Hebru Brantley for missing the hidden history next door to Nevermore Park. Some figures remain more hidden from the American public than others.