They would take newly minted jazz albums in Chicago and New York and resell them in hamlets across the country. "And in the area of popular culture they did it even more. "They were the eyes and ears across the country for the civil rights leaders," he explains.
In Rising from the Rails, Larry Tye describes what Pullman porters symbolized to black America. "Just by their very presence, these elegant men, clearly more learned than people in small towns, represented what life in the North might mean," says Larry Tye. And in times when many black and white Americans still lived separate lives, porters were an important link between races and regions. Pullman porters worked nearly round the clock to care for them all.
Larry Tye tells their story in his new book Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.įrom the late 19th century to the mid-20th, everyone from middle class Americans to movie stars and presidents traveled long distances by train.
It's been more than three decades since the last of the Pullman porters rode America's trains, but the men who toiled in the nation's most popular sleeping cars have left their mark on everything from labor unions to the civil rights movement.
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