For 100 years the Pullman porters rode the rails across America, and through their sacrifice, endurance, and activism, a Black middle class rose from those rails.
Larry Tye, journalist and author who tells the porters’ story in his 2014 book, “Rising From the Rails,” is the speaker for the Feb. 26 Warner Free Lecture.
The Historical Society and Arm in Arm are also hosts of the event, which will be accessible to registrants at 7 p.m. on Zoom.
In a phone conversation, Tye said he is very happy to tell this story for Black History Month because the porters are largely unknown to the current population, compared to other Black activists, and yet, he says, “Their story is a lens into the history of 100 years of Jim Crow in America.”
For his book, Tye interviewed porters’ relatives and 40 porters themselves, the youngest of whom was in his 80s. He said the men, after some initial skepticism, were grateful for the opportunity to talk about a story that had been too hard to tell their kids. Tye said he is happy the men got to see the impact of their sacrifices, to see that people like Michelle Obama and the late John Lewis were successful in part because of the inspiration they drew from the porters. And many have seen their children and grandchildren rise to positions of respect and power because they, as porters, provided economic stability and a strong work ethic. Perhaps more important, they “didn’t get mad, they got even” and taught their children out of their own experience to “rise above insults and show you’re better by being better.”
George Pullman did not invent the sleeping car in the 1860s, but he turned it into a “palace car,” a “rolling five-star hotel.” As luxurious as the accommodations were, with thick towels, toiletries, and beds made with a third sheet over the blanket to protect the face from chafing, it was the service that made the Pullman car distinctive.
Larry Tye. (Courtesy photo)
Tye explains how Pullman figured that an ex-slave from a plantation house would be the perfect attendant; he would have been trained to be obedient and invisible, and he would work long hours for low wages and never presume he would rise to a higher position.
The perfect attendant
Tye writes that, regardless of Pullman’s motivation in self-interest, the job of porter was better than jobs available to Blacks on farms or in factories. Though wages were low, money could be made through tips. A porter could see the country and get exposure to culture and education, if only from newspapers and books a white passenger might leave behind. And he had respect in his community, being on a social par with teachers, even doctors and lawyers. To combat stress, porters bonded with one another, sharing stories and creating a special language among themselves. But, writes Tye, “It was a Faustian bargain.” Porters spent long periods away from home, worked longer hours for less pay than any other railroad employee, had to be on call throughout the night, and be greeter, chambermaid, entertainer, butler, shoe-polisher, babysitter, and waiter. But most of all, they had to remain servile, to answer to “boy,” and to refrain from complaining for fear of losing tips or even their jobs. Tye said on the phone that porters had to follow a 50-page rule book and “eat injustice,” but “they got to do what no other Black men could do, and they managed to have a blast.”
At the turn of the 19th century,the Pullman Palace Car Company was the most anti-union company in the nation, and Tye recounts the many thwarted attempts the ad hoc Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters made to increase wages or reduce hours.
But porters were determined to cement their economic and social standing in the middle class and see their children get opportunities they had been denied. Finally, in 1925, porters struggling to launch a real union found a leader in Asa Philip Randolph, an activist “with a crusade to unionize Negro workers.” It would, however, be 12 years before the company signed a contract with the union.
From Jim Crow to civil rights
Tye writes that the porters’ efforts went beyond improving their working conditions; they got involved in civil rights “because they knew too much to stay mum.” More than most, they had been tormented by Jim Crow, and they had seen what could be possible if they had truly equal rights.
In the 1950s Pullman porters carried the civil rights message across the country, supporting initiatives through funding and organizing events. Their perseverance and sacrifices were their legacy to future generations; they helped change the social landscape.
Tye, who spent 20 years as a Boston Globe reporter and has written nine books, said he has learned to leave behind what he was taught about the necessity to be objective. His position now, as a writer of nonfiction, is to “be factual but be more like a columnist.” He said that in “Rising from the Rails” he shows America at its worst, with the treatment of porters embodying the epitome of racism, but he also shows the porters as inspirational and revolutionary in creating a Black middle class.
It’s still discouraging, he said, to see the extent to which “race is the story of America,” but he also wants to “acknowledge the progress.” Tye quotes one porter who went to work the year of that first contract as saying of the porters, “The union took them off their knees.”
