HPF Speaker Series: Don Villar

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“Filipinos & Pullman”

As African-American sleeping car porters organized in the late 1920s, the Pullman Company recruited Filipinos as replacements. Little did the corporation know that their newest workers would side with the new union. Learn more about the history of Filipino workers and their effect on the Pullman rail car company.

SPEAKER BIO: Don Villar is a labor activist, an Emmy award-winning former broadcast news journalist, and civil rights attorney. Villar is the current Secretary-Treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). He was elected to the post in 2018. At half a million union members, the CFL is the third largest central labor council in the country. Prior to his election to the CFL, Villar was President of NABET-CWA Local 41. He was elected as Local 41 President in 2015, representing broadcast TV workers across Chicago. For nearly 25 years, Villar was a news writer/producer at WLS-TV/ABC7 covering local, state, national, and international stories that impacted the people across Chicago. While working full-time in television news and moving up the ranks of leadership at his Union, Villar also began studies at Loyola University of Chicago Law School in 2008. He became a licensed attorney in 2012 and was of counsel at a small law firm where he practiced civil rights law. Villar received his Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Villar is an immigrant, born in the Philippines. His family immigrated to Chicago in 1973. He grew up in Chicago’s Uptown and Lakeview neighborhoods. Villar and his wife live in the West Loop.

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Join Historic Pullman Foundation for its 2022 Speaker Series, highlighting the history, neighborhood, culture, and monument of Pullman. The Speaker Series will take place the third Sunday of every month now through December.