rising from the rails the story of the pullman porter

Each was given an employee manual to read and memorize - which, in addition to 217 rules, included 'entire catechisms on how to clip a passenger's hair and pour an Old Fashioned Kentucky Colonel Mint Julep (and) what to do if a rider required surgery or the heating system did.' Pullman had a rigid criterion for his black railway workers - and his porters in particular: They had to be young, trim, tall, literate, and their skin had to be jet black (presumably to underscore the 'otherness' of their station). The first wave of porters was hired by the maniacal industrialist George Mortimer Pullman - whose luxurious 'Palace' cars revolutionized train travel and whose recruitment strategy focused exclusively on newly emancipated slaves in the South because, he thought, they would make the best servants. 'Behind almost every successful African American, there is a Pullman porter,' Tye writes. He succeeds in explaining how, in the late 19th through the early 20th century, the young African American laborer who, while working as a porter, (but also as a dining car waiter, fireman, brakeman, maid or cook) for the Pullman Rail Car Company, was the true harbinger of the Civil Rights movement and the precursor to today's black middle class.

But revealing his living influence on our social and cultural institutions today requires insight and imagination.

Rescuing a relic from the edge of oblivion is no easy task making room for him in the collective memory is harder still. The last generation of porters was slipping away, taking with them the memories and wisdom of an era that gave black Americans their first taste of freedom. When Larry Tye began collecting stories of the once ubiquitous Pullman porter for his latest book, 'Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class,' he knew he had to work fast.

Rising from the rails the story of the pullman porter