I was wondering if any of you out there have tackled the history of African Americans and their role in working for Pullman or the dining car departments of the various railroads? I am familiar with the book on the Pullman experience that came out last year, but I am looking to see how it might be handled as part of the museum experience. IF anyone can point me towards display materials and especially text, I would greatly appreciate it.

Try,
Michèle Gates Moresi
Curator of Collections
National Museum of African American
History and Culture
202.633.4762
moresim@si.edu

I point your attention to the following book:

Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" by Himself; a True History of Slavery Days, Life on the Great Cattle Ranges and on the Plains of the "Wild and Woolly" West, Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author, Los Angeles, 1907.

Available online http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/natlove/natlove.html

See especially the following chapters:

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Pullman Service; Life on the Rail; My First Trip; a Slump
in Tips; I Become Disgusted and Quit; a Period of Husking;
My Next Trip on the Pullman; Tips and the People Who
Give Them . . . . . 131

CHAPTER XIX.
The Pullman Palace Sleeping Car; Long Trips on the Rail; the
Wreck; One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin;
a Few of the Railroads Over Which I Have Traveled; the
Invalids and the Care We Give Them . . . . . 137

CHAPTER XX.
The Tourist Sleeping Car; the Chair Car; the Safeguards of
Modern Railroading; See America, Then Let Your Chest
Swell with Pride that You are an American . . . . . 142

CHAPTER XXI.
A Few of the Railroad Men Under Whom I Have Served; George
M. Pullman; the Town of Pullman, Ill.; American Railroads
Lead the World; a Few Figures . . . . . 148

A quick search of the Internet can put you in touch with some local Chicago resources for detailed information on African-American and indeed all workers associated with Pullman. A great many office records exist at the Newberry Library north of the Loop. Check out the online catalog of the Pullman records in Special Collections at www.newberry.org, then check by e-mail etc with Jo-Ellen Dickie in Special Collections for specifics. For historic background on the Pullman Company and the Historic Pullman District where many employees lived in a company built "model town" still very much in existence and cared for, there are two resources on Chicago's far south side: the Pullman District State Historic Site, Mike Wagenbach, curator (www.pullman-museum.org) and the Pullman District (www.pullmanil.org) small but nice private museum close by. For both resources I very much suggest checking for availability of hours and resources before scheduling a visit. At the IRM Pullman Library, we have very little on company records and next to nothing on the Pullman porter. I did find three prints of posed pictures of a Pullman porter in a WWII troop sleeper and scanned them for an African-American exhibit in San Francisco but beyond that we have not yet located anything.
Sincerely, Ted Anderson
Pullman Library, Illinois Railway Museum

I don't know too many details, but the Virginia Museum of Transportation has an exhibit on African-American railroaders, and there is a group of retired African-American railroaders that meet at the museum regularly. The exhibit itself was done several years ago, there has been a complete turnover of staff since then.

I highly recommend the book "THOSE PULLMAN BLUES: An Oral History of the African American Railroad Attendant" by David Perata, New York: Twayne Publishers (or MacMillian?), New York, 1996 (hardcover), reprinted Madison Books 1999 (soft cover). It has great oral history with the inside view of working in the Pullman and dining cars. Copies are readily available on www.abebooks.com.

- Doug Debs

I'm not at home and can't check my bookshelf, but you might look for a book called, I think, "Miles of Smiles," by a labor historian from the University of Chicago. This contained interviews with Pullman porters, and you might get the use of some the quotes. As I recall, the editor's commentary in this book was kind of tendentious, but the quotes from the porters were very powerful.

That would be Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters, by Jack Santino. Published by University of Illinois Press in 1989.

I would recommend the book Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, by Larry Tye. It appears to be available as both hardcover and softcover (Henry Holt & Company, 2004 & 2005) editions through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and undoubtedly other sources.

I second the motion for Tye's book "Rising From the Rails", although it's likely, in the eyes of many more serious researchers, to suffer just a bit from the "popular history" curse of sacrificing a degree of substance and seriousness in exchange for greater accessibility and popularity (see Stephen Ambrose vs. David Howard Bain et al.). Being a newer book, it's likely more accessible and available than older books.

The National Railroad Museum, located in Green Bay, WI, is currently developing an exhibit discussing the Pullman Porters. The Pullman Porters: From Service to Civil Rights opens in July 2008 and will be featuring the newly restored Pullman Sleeper, the Lake Mitchell. This exhibit will allow the visitor to immerse themselves into the 1930s by walking through the Lake Mitchell, while also having the opportunity to step off the train to discover history through additional artifacts and an interactive kiosk. Labels within the exhibit will not only discuss the Pullman Company and the Porter's job, but look at the greater cultural changes that occurred through the porter's work.

It promises to be a wonderful exhibit, and I would be happy to answer any inquiries about it. You are welcome to contact me at jdfrank@nationalrrmuseum.org.

Jacqueline D. Frank
Director of Education and Programs
National Railroad Museum

Jacqueline, I'd just like to tip my cap to you and NRM for designing and mounting this exhibit. It sounds excellently thought through, and this kind of storytelling about people on the rails who made a difference in the way we live to today is exactly what we need more of. Well done! Good on you!

The original question included dining car service as well as Pullman porters. The current issue of the PRRT&HS The Keystone reproduces an advertisement from 1929 showing an African-American cook and describing PRR's program for "post graduate education" for its 2500 cooks and waiters. Yes, the ad referred to 2500. From what I recall of the PRR, and I was in its Traffic Department from 1962 to 1968, the cooks and waiters were almost entirely African-Americans. If the same was true on many of the other railroads, surely they must have outnumbered the Pullman porters, yet I have seen virtually nothing on the subject. I also seem to recall that the lounge car attendants were almost entirely Filipino. It was definitely a different world...

The book Rising from the Rails includes some information about dining car cooks and waiters. The former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall's father was a waiter on the B&O. Not all railroads completely staffed dining cars with African-American cooks and waiters; I recall that the Great Northern employed White cooks and Black waiters.

One of the great disparities that the African-Americans were subject to was that they could never obtain the supervisory positions of Pullman Conductor or dining car steward. They may become an porter-in-charge or a waiter-in-charge -- but never at the same pay rate as a conductor or a steward. One of the first, if not the first, class-action law suits was the one that the Pullman porters-in-charge brought against the Pullman Company in the 1960s for the lack of advancement in pay and job status to Conductor.


The Pullman Company began hiring Filipinos to work in its lounge cars as an effort to break the formation of the Porter's union.

In the lobby of the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona PA there is a mannequin of an African-American dining car attendant of the PRR. One of the 4 computer-controlled "lobby shows" in our facility is an oral history of what it was like to perform that function for the Pennsy and features the mannequin as the "narrator" of the story. Most all of the mannequins in the Museum were "real people". They were sent to the studio of the company hired to create them and had latex molds made of their heads and hands for use in the creation of these "lifescapes". This particular one was supposed to be Mr. James Corbett, a dining car waiter on the PRR who survived the wreck of the Red Arrow on Bennington Curve near Horseshoe Curve 60 years ago. Mr. Corbett had his grandson stand in as the model for the creation of his mannequin. The lobby program featuring this story runs approximately 7 minutes.

The interior renovation of our PRR diner is nearly complete and we plan to create a much more complete exhibit on this subject that what currently exists in the Museum building.

I'm always on the lookout for more information about Pullman porters and African Americans who worked in train and engine service before 1960. I was blessed to have two uncles who were on bothe sides of the ledger and I wish I had had a tape recorder to get their stories for posterity.