Rising from the Rails : Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

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Summary: Lessons from a Lost Profession
Review: You can't see train porters anymore, except in the movies. Everyone knew the role of the ubiquitous porter, a role with duties, uniform, and demeanor. In the movies, actors played porters as porters had played their occupational roles, busy and even servile, humorous and fawning, wise to the needs and foolishness of their passengers and ignorant as members of their race were held to be. The paradoxes of the porters get a wonderful historical evaluation in _Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class_ (Henry Holt) by Larry Tye. A history of the porters was overdue, but Tye is squeaking this one in. There were generations of porters, but the last of them is slipping away, and some of them he interviewed for the book did not live to see it printed. Porters, for all their servility and for all the neglect that passengers often gave them, made an impression, and Tye makes the wonderful case of another paradox. The porter, whose attitude might be classed now as "Uncle Tom-ism", was a necessary element to bring about the Civil Rights movement.

The porters were, from beginning to end, creatures of the Pullman Rail Car Company. George Pullman brought out the first one in 1865, and by 1867, he was looking for a reliable way to staff the cars; Pullman needed one single worker who would be hotelier, waiter, chambermaid, butler, and information desk. There was a newly invented pool of workers to draw from, the former slaves from the South. Many had worked in plantation houses and were familiar with duties requiring close proximity to wealthy white folk. There was poor pay and atrocious hours, but many porters appreciated the opportunity to escape the south and trade overalls for bow ties and starched pants. Porters could read the business pages discarded by their passengers, and they learned how the Pullman Company was flourishing while they were barely getting by. Part of the porters' history involves eventual unionizing and developing themselves as a commercial force, and the indefatigable efforts of A. Philip Randolph to bring about a union are highlighted here. Randolph was a Civil Rights leader for decades, and eventually organized the March on Washington, for which Martin Luther King (who held Randolph in reverence) is better remembered.

By the time the porters had reached their greatest unified commercial strength, their profession was coming to an end. Road and airplane travel took passengers away, and Amtrak was just a ghost of past glory. Tye convinces readers, however, that the porters had a disproportionate effect on the black community. At their height, porters were 0.1% of blacks in America, and yet for any black American excelling in any field in the last half century, there is an odds-on chance that there was a Pullman porter in that person's past. They did it by the same means: "... sacrificing for their children, and deferring dreams of self-improvement for a generation or even two, but never abandoning them." They may have been underlings, but the best of them profited by being around even the most unpleasant passengers. About one incident, a porter explained that after some slight, he was able to hold his tongue: "It was an accomplishment. I kept from hating passengers like that. I called myself outsmarting them." Tye's impressive look at the influence of a long-gone profession is at its best when bringing back the words and stories of the porters themselves. "My mother taught me never to quarrel with a fool, but to humor him. That's what I do," said one. Another concluded, "You just gotta haul folks as they come. Some's good, some's bad, some's nice and some's crabby."