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NYC’s first Black train conductor broke racial barriers in 1930s
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Feb 17, 2025
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Irving Browning/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Feb 17, 2025
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New York City will mark a key milestone this year: The transit system hired its first Black train conductor 90 years ago, shattering a barrier that has since offered tens of thousands of African Americans and other people of color a pathway to the middle class.
Jotham T. Coleman, whom researchers have little information about, was hired as a conductor by the Independent Subway System on Oct. 15, 1935, when the city agency first opened motorman and conductor positions to Black New Yorkers, according to Polly Desjarlais, a content manager at the New York Transit Museum.
The move came as the Board of Transportation, a bygone agency that ran the city’s publicly owned subway system at the time, began to expand its workforce, according to Desjarlais.
“It was the Depression, and having civil service rules was more equitable,” Desjarlais said. “Suddenly jobs were opened up that were formerly closed to African Americans.”
Prior to Coleman’s hiring, the city’s public and private transportation systems relegated Black employees to jobs as cleaners and porters, who earned lower wages than conductors and motormen — the people who drive trains.
“In the 1930s, transit workers were poorly paid,” said Joshua Freeman, a labor historian and retired professor at the CUNY School of Labor. “It was a notoriously badly paid industry and Black workers in it were paid the worst. But once you get to unionization, you begin a path towards benefits and salary increases that really blossoms after World War II.”
Within a decade of Coleman’s unprecedented appointment, the number of Black conductors on the subways skyrocketed. Board of Transportation records show the number of Black conductors employed by the agency grew from 63 in 1939 to 405 in 1944.
Today, roughly 40% of the MTA’s 70,000 workers are Black, including several of the agency’s highest-ranking employees. Last year, Demetrius Crichlow became NYC Transit's first Black president, overseeing the agency’s subway and bus operations.
“[The MTA] is definitely a majority-minority organization, and I think, again, the civil service offered African Americans a way into the middle class and a way into the kind of employment that provides a steady income and a pension,” Desjarlais said. “Civil service work and civil service jobs is really being sort of the American dream. This is how you get ahead.”
But even after Coleman was hired, Black transit workers still weren't treated as equals. In a 1938 letter to Transport Workers Union founder Michael Quill, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. — who chaired a New York employment committee at the time — wrote that Black transit workers were “systematically excluded from the personnel” and rarely, if ever, recognized for their contributions to the city’s growing mass transit systems.
For his part, records show Quill also accused his union’s white members of racism.
In a separate letter to City Councilmember Benjamin Davis Jr. of Harlem in the 1930s, Quill wrote there was “hostility on the part of the white workers who have centuries of chauvinist teachings behind them, decades of railroad ‘tradition,’ and general fear that the Negro in industry would offer so much more competition for the few remaining jobs.”
Black Americans gained more labor protections through the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but historians say it’s also important to honor the memory of workers like Coleman, who broke racial barriers in New York decades earlier.
“We talk about these people as exceptions,” said Desjarlais. “But it’s still important to me that names of people, that we speak them out loud, that people hear those names.”
Tagged
new york city
Race And Justice Unit
transportation
Ramsey Khalifeh
Ramsey Khalifeh is a transportation reporter on the NYC Accountability desk covering the largest transit system in the country. He was previously a general assignment reporter at Gothamist and worked on the Boston Globe's metro and copy desk. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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