Boss of the Grips: Interview with Eric K. Washington
Interviewed by Prithi Kanakamedala
Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal
Eric K. Washington
Liveright, 2019
352 pages
Today on the blog, Prithi Kanakamedala talks to Eric K. Washington about his current work, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. This book has garnered a great deal of praise, including citation as one of the Best Biographies of 2019 by Open Letters Review and special recognition from The Municipal Art Society of New York as a 2020 Brendan Gill Prize Finalist.
Let’s start with the most basic question: who was James H. Williams?
A 1921 magazine cover depicts a Red Cap porter, typically charged with all manner of a traveler’s bundles—even a cranky toddler. Illustration by William Clifford Hoople, American Legion Weekly, October 7, 1921.
James H. Williams was an African-American New Yorker, born in 1878 to formally enslaved parents from Virginia. In 1903 he was the first black hired into the all-white railroad station attendant system of Grand Central Terminal, the new “gateway to the American continent” under construction. His hire and subsequent promotion to Chief Attendant quickly gave rise to an essentially all-black system of Harlem-based railroad station porters known as Red Caps. For almost half a century until his death in 1948, Williams fairly personified one of the most iconic labor sectors of America’s Jim Crow segregation era where African-American men were constantly forced to negotiate rigid color barriers.
Racial uplift was the urgent theme of the time. Towards that goal, Chief Williams notably helped to position two of New York’s pioneer, and long best-known, uniformed civil servants. In 1911 his assistant chief Red Cap Samuel J. “Jesse” Battle became the city’s first black policeman. And eight years later, in 1919, Williams’s own son Wesley A. Williams became Manhattan’s first black fireman. Wesley Williams also became the fire department’s first black officer with successive promotions as lieutenant, captain and battalion chief. The very visibility of both men in the sphere of public enforcement, protection and authority was inherently controversial.
In 1918, Williams (black tailcoat, left margin) proudly shows off his new star lineup of the Grand Central Terminal Red Cap Baseball Club at Harlem’s popular Lenox Oval, at Lenox Avenue and 145th Street. Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
These were achievements that Chief Williams was lauded for influencing even more broadly. At Grand Central Terminal, where he sometimes supervised some 500 men, Williams was particularly known for hiring hundreds of young black college students. He expressed pride that about forty percent of his station’s Red Caps reportedly had college training, outshining any other Terminal department. Grand Central’s redcap porters were famously overqualified for their menial positions, a paradox that typically gave rise to such headlines as “Ph.D Carries Your Bags.” One former Red Cap attesting to this was Earl Brown, a Harvard alum journalist and politician: “Only because the Chief had a big heart and was proud of his race were hundreds of young colored men able to go through college.”
And why is his life — and it was an amazing life — important for us to know today, do you think? Especially in terms of this city's history?
Williams’s life and contribution are germane both looking back and looking forward. For one, he was part of the central nervous system of the Harlem Renaissance, that storied era whose centennial has sparked numerous celebrations and programs during this past year. Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s indeed shone as a polestar of African-American cultural, literary, and artistic expression. However, our collective memory of that era often settles on its same familiar round-up of celebrities, too often overlooking figures stirring other entrepreneurial, social, and labor ventures.
With the immediacy of today’s global COVID-19 pandemic, Chief Williams’s staunch determination and resourcefulness might offer some heartening lessons. He and his precariat workforce always rallied the means to prevail over doubtful prospects and rigged Jim Crow systems. They exemplified the African-American resolve, and sustained morale of “making a way out of no way,” a challenge the world’s present health crisis is now thrusting upon everybody.
Talk us through the research process for this biography. Was the archival material readily available? How long did the research process take? And how did various fellowships assist in the researching and writing process?
The book’s overall process from initial research to publication took about five to six years. It began with an article I wrote about Chief Williams and the Red Caps in February 2013. The piece celebrated both Black History Month and the centennial of Grand Central Terminal, where the Municipal Art Society of New York had just engaged me to lead walking tours.
Probing Williams’s world was always an admixture of conventional and idiosyncratic research. He wasn’t a man of letters, and left little personal writing for me to pore through. But primary sources from a host of disparate archives — such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Rockefeller Archives, the NAACP Archives and others — enabled me to fairly trace his life’s progress. Though buried, a few extant firsthand letters and published interviews conjured Williams’s direct voice. These included his correspondences to New York’s Catholic archbishop Cardinal Hayes, to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and to an associate of John D. Rockefeller.
A yearlong 2015-2016 fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography was indispensable. The stipend enabled me to devote time to broadening my initial research. Not just for locating new primary sources, but combing through scores of materials on various topics which wove an intricately bigger picture around Williams’s own life and times — labor, arts, athletics, community activism, hospitality, war relief, fraternal associations, Harlem, travel, etcetera. Another invaluable fellowship was Columbia University’s Community Scholars Program during 2015-2017; the school’s library databases enabled me to search American journals and historical newspapers, including those of the robust black press, as well as censuses and certain vital records or indexes.
All this material in my lap made me greatly appreciate a month’s residency at Dora Maar House in France in September 2017. The quiet refuge there helped me to further sift Williams’s life from countless letters and observations of others; from public records and chronicles; and from archival images, which especially included family photos that his great-grandson Charles Ford Williams opened up to me. Those institutional and social resources were all crucial in my effort to contextualize the span of Chief Williams’s life and influence through several important eras.
A mellow portrait of James H. Williams, in an Otto Sarony Studio photograph, circa 1905, typically belied his community activism. Williams’s “antlers” lapel pin defied a law enacted to bar blacks from wearing Elks insignia. His lodge, Manhattan Lodge no. 45, overturned the so-called Grattan Bill in court. Charles Ford Williams Family Collection.
How did your work in public history — your wonderful walking tours, a deep knowledge of the city's streets, and its heritage — inform your research and writing of this book?
I think giving both neighborhood and cemetery walking tours certainly accustomed me to scouring for telling images. The most illuminating ones were often deceptively simple, like a photo portrait of Williams I included — his modest lapel pin buttoned an inconspicuous story of race, civil rights and black organizational politics. For this biography I wasn’t interested in proclaiming a so-called “definitive” reveal of James H. Williams. I was more interested in getting a bead on a life as it intersected and influenced the evolving social and cultural world of black New Yorkers in the ever-changing metropolis.
And what’s next?
Author photo by Brice Toul
I’m currently circling around the impulse to write a group biography. Williams unwittingly introduced me to scores of compelling and unsung New Yorkers, black and white. I’m plumbing more research on some who are already in Boss of the Grips. They particularly include Peter S. Porter, an abolitionist and hotelier who black New Yorkers publicly celebrated, in the wake of Elizabeth Jennings’s benchmark 1855 legal victory, in the long fight for equal rights on public conveyances. And D.E. Tobias, whose influence ranged from lucid critiques of America’s convict-leasing system to vaudeville press agent. Also Richard Huey, a young man of the Harlem Renaissance era — who applied to Chief Williams for a Red Cap job with a letter of reference from W.E.B. Du Bois — whose theatrical career quickly rose as a Broadway actor and as a Harlem restaurateur. So far these are just strong inclinations I’m still taking soundings on.
Eric K. Washington is an independent historian and writer. He is on the the board of the Biographers International Organization (BIO) and is the founder of Tagging-the-Past, which endeavors to reconnect forgotten history to present landscapes through articles, talks and tours.