Los Angeles Railway was not previously known as a socially progressive organization, nor were many other industries or job markets of the early 1940s.
The headlines of the Los Angeles Sentinel and the California Eagle from 1942-1944, the leading African American newspapers in Los Angeles took notice.
They noted that racial integration of the ranks of motormen was a major change from past practices, skillyfully negotiated by the Reverend Clayton Russell’s Los Angeles Negro Victory Comittee, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the Fair Employment Practices Commission and the reform-minded Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron.
Hiring women as streetcar and bus operators in 1942 was a small start.
In August of 1944, and without much fanfare, Los Angeles Railway hired its first African-American motorman, Mrs. Arcola Philpott — a “motormanette.”
Maybe it was Philadelphia’s William Barber, or New York’s first Black motorman William Bath that were her inspiration to walk into the employment office of the L.A. Railway and apply, or maybe it was the community’s support, or maybe it was the sight of women all over the U.S. working as streetcar operators and other important jobs.
Arcola Philpott’s daughter, Ethel Philpott of Chicago, believes it was the inspiration of other women going to work in what had been known as traditionally men’s jobs that inspired her mother to become a streetcar operator. She told us:
My mother was just like that, born in the wrong era for all the things she wanted to do. She was a real go-getter. She was extremely intelligent, courageous, fearless and a life-long learner.
Arcola worked out of Arthur Winston Division 5 and drove the “F” line from 116th/South Vermont Avenue to Union Station, traveling up Vermont to Santa Barbara (now Martin Luther King Boulevard), Grand, Jefferson, Main, Macy (now Cesar Chavez) to the Union Station Passenger Terminal.
Within a few weeks of hiring Mrs. Philpott, Los Angeles Railway hired its first black motormen.