Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle

The First African American Trade Union

The story of the organizing of the first black trade union - The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters - provides an account of African American working life between the Civil War and World War II.

MILES OF SMILES chronicles the organizing of the first black trade union - the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This inspiring story of the Pullman porters provides one of the few accounts of African American working life between the Civil War and World War II.

MILES OF SMILES describes the harsh discrimination which lay behind the porters' smiling service. Narrator Rosina Tucker, a 100 year old union organizer and porter's widow, describes how after a 12 year struggle led by A. Philip Randolph, the porters won the first contract ever negotiated with black workers. MILES OF SMILES both recovers an important chapter in the emergence of black America and reveals a key source of the Civil Rights movement.

Official Selection at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

"One hundred years of history is spanned in an enlightening portrait of admirable dignity." - New York Times

"A moving account of the Pullman porters' remarkable (and largely untold) history." - Washington Post