Background
Townsend was born on December 4, 1895 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the son of Willard Townsend, contractor, and Cora Beatrice Townsend, who were cousins.
(The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)
The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 contains the world's most comprehensive collection of records and briefs brought before the nation's highest court by leading legal practitioners - many who later became judges and associates of the court. It includes transcripts, applications for review, motions, petitions, supplements and other official papers of the most-studied and talked-about cases, including many that resulted in landmark decisions. This collection serves the needs of students and researchers in American legal history, politics, society and government, as well as practicing attorneys. This book contains copies of all known US Supreme Court filings related to this case including any transcripts of record, briefs, petitions, motions, jurisdictional statements, and memorandum filed. This book does not contain the Court's opinion. The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping ensure edition identification: Willard Saxby Townsend et al., Petitioners, v. the New York Central Railroad Company et al. Petition / LEON M DESPRES / 1944 / 171 / 323 U.S. 717 / 65 S.Ct. 47 / 89 L.Ed. 577 / 6-16-1944 Willard Saxby Townsend et al., Petitioners, v. the New York Central Railroad Company et al. Brief in Opposition (P) / J R BARSE / 1944 / 171 / 323 U.S. 717 / 65 S.Ct. 47 / 89 L.Ed. 577 / 7-31-1944
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Townsend was born on December 4, 1895 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the son of Willard Townsend, contractor, and Cora Beatrice Townsend, who were cousins.
He attended public schools in Cincinnati and graduated from Walnut Hills High School in 1912.
He also studied chiropody at the Illinois School of Chiropody and practiced the profession for a short while.
Townsend moved to Canada to continue his education. While there, he took a premedical course at the University of Toronto for two years. In 1924 he received a degree in chemistry from the Royal College of Science in Toronto. He supported himself while studying by working as a dining-car waiter and redcap on the Canadian National Railways.
As late as 1951 he earned a degree from the Blackstone Law School.
His first job in the industry that would be the foundation of his life's work came in 1914, when he became a redcap at the Union Station in Cincinnati. In 1916 he joined the army and served with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I.
After the war he took a prominent role in organizing a Cincinnati company of the Ohio National Guard and eventually rose to first lieutenant.
After running unsuccessfully for city councilman in Cincinnatiю
Townsend went to Texas, where he spent several years as a schoolteacher. In 1929 he moved to Chicago.
He also began work as a redcap with the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. During the early 1930's, Townsend initiated efforts to organize redcaps, a group that lacked job security and received abysmally low pay. As late as 1938, according to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), few received wages from their employers. Their livelihoods came from tips given by the passengers whose baggage they carried. Wages ranged from a token $1 a year to $10 per month, while tips averaged from $1 to $3 a day. Labor organizers had to overcome both the resistance of management and the hostility that blacks felt toward organized labor in general. Chicago was the ideal location for one interested in organizing railroad service employees. It was a major terminus, but perhaps more important, from an organizational standpoint, it was also the center of activity of A. Philip Randolph's and Milton P. Webster's efforts to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Much publicity surrounded their activities, and Townsend observed their work and profited from their experience.
In 1936 Townsend called representatives of various local redcap groups together in Chicago to discuss forming a national union. That group founded the International Brotherhood of Red Caps, with Townsend as president. After withstanding a leadership challenge the following year, Townsend solidified his position in the union, becoming its perennial president. In 1940 the union changed its name to the United Transport Service Employees (UTSE) and two years later obtained a charter from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Townsend then gained a seat on the CIO Executive Council, thus becoming the highest-ranking black labor leader in the country and the first ever to become a vice-president in the national labor movement. Randolph had long labored in the ranks of the American Federation of Labor, but that branch of the labor movement did not elevate him to national office until 1957. Townsend was a dashing and energetic agent for both this union and the CIO.
In 1938, following a procedure the BSCP had pioneered in 1927, he successfully appealed to the ICC to have redcaps declared employees of railroads, and thus eligible to bargain collectively under railway labor legislation. He then negotiated contracts that improved redcaps' wages and working conditions. Townsend's major work with the CIO was on the Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination, a post to which he was appointed in 1942; he served as secretary in 1943. He worked also as a liaison between the American labor movement and labor organizations abroad.
In 1947 and 1952 he represented the CIO at conferences in Japan. He wrote a pamphlet, Trade Union Practices and Policies, which was translated into Japanese to instruct Japanese workers on the purposes of trade unionism.
He died in Chicago.
(The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)
Townsend, a conservative, was devoutly anti-Communist. His denunciation of a tobacco workers' union as a Communist front actually worked against the labor movement when North Carolina workers, fearful of Communism yet unwilling to support the group Townsend endorsed, voted for nonrepresentation in a jurisdictional dispute in 1947.
On another occasion he showed his conservatism when he supported Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in his stance that it was unnecessary for the UAW to have a black vicepresident. Townsend called such a demand on the part of black UAW members "racism in reverse. "
Townsend's support of white trade union leaders may have stemmed from his own precarious position among blacks. Numerous black journalists decried the lack of results achieved by the Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination, and Townsend confronted healthy competition from leaders of the BSCP, an older and stronger union that wanted jurisdiction over the workers he represented. Nevertheless, Townsend's activities in organized labor led to positions of influence in black leadership circles. He became a prominent figure in Chicago politics.
He performed important functions on racial matters for the Chicago Urban League and the mayor of Chicago, and he lent his considerable prestige to fund-raising campaigns for Hampton Institute and served on its board of trustees.
In October 1930, he married Consuello Mann; they had one son.
