I'd like to add to Dave's comments regarding lost opportunities in the Deep South, but outside Savannah.

The local "history" museum where I was formerly heavily involved exists in a ca. 1913 segregated depot that was constructed to replace a "non-conforming" depot that had been constructed in the late 1880's. There is no acknowledgement of the segregated nature of the depot, except occasionally during the few guided tours done by folks who could care less about that aspect of the building's heritage. No signs or text panels that I know of, and for the past 10 years the director has avoided the subjects of segregation and integration like the plague. And this from the oldest "history" group in this predominantly black region.

This depot was the location of the arrest of the last group of Freedom Riders who boarded the Central of Georgia Flamingo in Atlanta on December 10, 1961 with the express purpose of testing the railroad's compliance with the new federal law desegregating transportation facilities. There is no acknowledgement of this at the museum.

When the director of the museum heads a study group that ultimately results in the operational joining of the "history" museum with a natural science facility instead of forging a relationship with the local, well done Civil Rights Institute museum, it shows just how much things really have not changed here. The Civil Rights Institute does deal with the bus Freedom Riders, even though the well known bus rides did not come through Albany. It also references the train Freedom Ride, but not to any great extent.

Several years ago this "history" museum acquired a wood-bodied combine from MOT, primarily because of its local railroad connection and the fact that the museum had no revenue passenger cars in its collection. Dave and I went to St. Louis to check out the car and decide if there was enough to preserve. On Dave's recommendation we decided to accept and move the car back to home territory. John Hankey was, at the time, consulting with Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, and I was working with the CHS folks on a restoration plan where the car would be restored at the Roundhouse and then shipped to Albany for display with a locomotive from the same railroad. I recall my great excitement at the prospect of using this car to interpret the Jim Crow laws, but I was skeptical that the car was actually a partitioned coach. As further research determined the smaller compartment of the 2 passenger compartments was, in fact, a smoking compartment and not a segregated seating compartment, that excitement waned. Being the "good ol' boy" that he is, I seriously doubt that the Albany museum's director would have stuck with any plan to interpret segregation/Jim Crow anyway.

At about the same time the combine was being studied, Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, GA outside Atlanta had a Central of Georgia modernized HW partitioned coach that, at the time, was available (CG 527). I tried to get the Albany museum interested in making that acquisition because 1) the museum had no Central of Georgia passenger equipment in the collection, and 2) it was a partitioned coach that could be used to interpret that time in our history. Funding was not an issue. The cost of the car was reasonable and getting it moved from Atlanta to Albany would have been a single railroad move over NS, a doable proposition with the contacts at the time. Once again, the director didn't even take the idea to the Board of Directors, instead making the unilateral decision to not pursue the interpretive potential of this one car for the collection.

And so it goes...

To believe that any railroad would intentionally turn away paying customers of any color does not make much sense. I would have to believe that the Central of Georgia had no intention of specifically excluding blacks from the Nancy Hanks II, but maybe so. I would perhaps interpret the lack of including blacks in making reservations as a practical matter of the time. Due to the economics of the era, the railroad probably didn't expect many blacks to be taking planned family vacation or business trips from Atlanta to Savannah/Savannah to Atlanta. Most black passengers at the time would probably have been walkups, not advance reservation passengers, and would therefore be more likely to ride those older trains.

There's no doubt that the railroad would take white passengers first (reservations), and would be perfectly happy to fill the train with white customers, and I realize that was probably Dan's point. But I wonder what would have happened if a black family did call in a reservation. Would the railroad turn them away when they arrived to board? Probably, but unless anyone has some first-hand knowledge of such an event we'll never know for sure.

On the flip side of that thought, southern blacks of the time would probably not have even thought of trying to make reservations on a brand new streamliner...

The fact that the original Nancy Hanks II consist had to be quickly augmented because of the train's popularity must mean they had plenty of (white?) passengers making reservations.

But otherwise, from a business viewpoint the color of money is green...

Crosslink to related thread:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33580

The fact that there had to be Jim Crow LAWS implies that some businesses would not voluntarily go with the program. Interstate businesses like railroads still find that complying with conflicting regulations in the various places they run to be a problem.

This post from the Yahoo Group PRR-FAX List says 1949 was different:

I have found that many members of our museums that belong to the pre world war 2 generation simply refuse to deal with the Jim Crow issue, and many also refuse to acknowlege that "those people" have both a history to maintain and a contribution to make to our preservation efforts today. Those of us who are somewhat younger attempt to focus on two more positive issues, looking back to use Jim Crow as gauge to see how far we have come in the last 60 years, and also to discuss and demonstrate that although segregation was the LAW of the land, it was not always practiced by individuals, managers and owners on the job site.

We have numerous examples of segregation that still exist on our site and may be easily referenced by our tour guides. The mill commissary lunch room has a white and a black section, where the whites actually ate inside, and the blacks came in, picked up their lunch and ate outside. Our rail bus once had a whites only section up front, and a baggage, mail and black section in the back. The mill town itself was completely segregated, even to the extent of separating whites, blacks and hispanics, and our maps show that. Old photographs of the mill workers are segregated with the whites in front (with their names) and blacks in the back (unnamed). Every train operated by the logging railroad had a black caboose and a white caboose, for the train crew of different races.

At the same time, we try to emphasize that the logging company, its owners and managers, although required to enforce segregation by the law, did NOT discriminate on the job site. There are photographs of log trains in the woods operated entirely by black crews, as well as main line log trains (operated by the logging company) crewed by at least a black engineer and fireman. The common carrier trains had to have white engineer, because union membership was closed to blacks but the same job, running the log trains over the same tracks was available to them. We have several pages of paperwork discussing the fact that on the work site, blacks were promoted to supervisors, who supervised racially mixed crews, although the highest skilled jobs at the top did apparently go only to whites. We even have paper work that states that a mill foreman who discriminated in his hiring practices during the depression was fired for just those hiring practices.

We do recognize that not every company operating in the south followed these practices. However we do note that these practices created a great loyalty from all of its employees to the family that owned the company that persists to the present day and conversely, the family feels that loyalty to those few remaining employees from that era.

We are not perfect in this. There are still board members who even today oppose having a decendent of either the hispanic or the black workers on our board, even though several of those who have expressed interest have become prominent members of the community. Adding them to our board can only help us both preserve history and expand the outreach of the museum, yet the opportunity is not taken to do so.

I ran across this gentleman's story the other day. The salient point for this discussion is in the fourth paragraph:
http://blackhistorycanada.ca/profiles.p ... d=20&id=16

Once the governor found out he was black, nothing, from the way he got there to what his family was permitted to do, was simple. There's a Life Magazine article about the vacation, but I wasn't able to get it to display properly.

As you may know, for many years Ted Kornweibel was the Restoration Superintendent at PSRM in Campo, CA. His health has prevented him from continuing in that position, but his last big accomplishment at the museum was the restoration of RS&S #3, a Jim Crow combine car. He also supervised the construction of a display containing a large number of photos describing the African-American experience in working on the railroads.

The reaction of African-Americans when viewing the Jim Crow car can only be described as widely varied.

One man: "Take it out and burn it!"

Another: "I don't want to see it, but I'm glad you have it so that others can see that such things existed."

And "Yes, I want to bring my grand children out to see it."

I was talking to one several-generation family, and mentioned the Jim Crow car. One of the younger ones, about 12, said, "What's Jim Crow?" So, I guess some progress has been made.

One issue that can potentially arise with emotionally charged issues like segregation (or indigenous peoples, the Holocaust, etc.) is the hazard of letting emotions overrule what are otherwise strict historical data.

Railfans, and by extension to some extent rail museums, tend to wrap themselves in cold data, dates, etc. Social history, by comparison, focuses on human emotions, feelings, and abstractions. At times, these methodologies don't see eye to eye.

Furthermore, we've all seen rail history accounts that are modestly to horrendously inaccurate, and, if you've studied the publication of and reaction to books like Stephen Ambrose's "Nothing Like It In the World," you've seen how inaccuracies become part of the public record. We have a responsibility to be historically accurate and correct such errors as best we can, but at time correcting blatant inaccuracies will make you unpopular, especially if--as is often the case with such social histories--the inaccuracies further a broader agenda of the modern-day historians.

An interesting example of this syndrome I found recently was a "hubbub" over the "traditional" American Negro song "Follow the Drinking Gourd," a song so enshrined in Underground Railroad legend that documentarian Ken Burns had Richie Havens sing it for his accompanying Civil War music documentary, "Songs of the Civil War." Several popular children's books tell the story today, and planetariums have done shows based on the song. In recent years, however, researchers have suggested that the song was collected and/or augmented in the 20th century by the "folk song army" of activist singers who then promoted the song heavily, and that the suggested ties to the Underground Railroad and the 19th century are tenuous at best and fraudulent at worst:

http://www.followthedrinkinggourd.org/

Needless to say, this interpretation/scholarship does NOT go over well with certain African-American Studies academics.

Similarly, see the well-documented "hubbub" that erupted over restoring the "Enola Gay" to display:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay# ... ontroversy

We owe it to ourselves and our patrons to maintain an accurate technical historical record. We tread into "activism" and emotional "minefields" at our peril.

Museums should interpret segregation. RR history is about people, more than anything else. At the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, outside of San Diego, we exhibit a completely restored 120-year old Jim Crow car, plus a 100+photo display on the black railroad experience. Black visitors are almost universally pleased that this neglected chapter of RR history is being honestly and forthrightly told.

Look for a lengthy discussion about interpreting ssegregation and Jim Crow cars in the next issue of the Railway Museum Quarterly/Trainline.

If any museum is looking for a Jim Crow car, there are two pretty complete ones for sale, both heavyweights, one Cof G, the other MoPac. Details in the article cited above.

And if you want a complete history of blacks and railroading, see Theodore Kornweibel, Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey (2010)

Ted -

You and your restoration crew should be congratulated on your wonderful restoration of RS&S #3. The history of that car is quite fascinating, being built originally in Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1886 as PRR #3736.

Speaking of segregation on railroad equipment, Bob Kutella once told me that one of the interurban cars at IRM in Union, Illinois was a segregated car. As I recall it, Bob told me that the segregation was not for black passengers, but for native-Americans! Maybe I have that wrong though; it's been a while since Bob mentioned that to me.


Les