Trains, Why I Love Trains

My first long train ride was coming from Miami Beach back to New York. My father who wasn't a great planner, OK, he was a ridiculous procrastinator, had managed to get our family down to Florida on my first airplane flight. The plane left at 10:00 at night from "Idlewild" and my mother made my sister and me wear "twin" outfits with gloves. But my father waited so long that he didn't have a way for us to get home. Finally he located four train tickets, but without sleeping arrangements. So I didn't get to experience the Pullman Car, sleeping in my seat instead, very uncomfortably, but we did eat our meals in the dining car.

Despite that first experience, I love train travel. My daughter and I took the train to Washington DC several times when we visited national sites, especially the Smithsonian American History Museum, and my favorites, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. In China a few years ago, we took the train from Beijing to Xian, overnight, in "hard seat" accommodations, which meant six to a sleeping car on a very thin mattress. On Monday I'm taking the Acela from New York to Washington DC in just three hours.

You might not know this, but today the country is celebrating National Train Day.

The celebration includes honoring the men who served as Pullman Porters. As humiliating as their history might be, Pullman Porters were the backbone of the black middle class. George Pullman hired only Southern black men to work the luxurious train sleeping cars, believing they would be subservient, and most importantly, they would never see the wealthy men who often misbehaved on the trains sometime later in social situations.

What happened on the train, stayed on the train.

The Pullman car was introduced in 1867. The porters began unionizing in 1925 as the first African American union, and by 1937 they had signed a collective bargaining agreement. Originally they were paid a pittance, and received tips. But despite being called the generic "George" or "Boy," these men became the grandfathers and fathers of America's civil rights giants. The first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and California's ubiquitous politician Willie Brown (he controlled the California legislature as majority leader, then became mayor of San Francisco due to terms limits) both descended from Pullman Porters.

When Rosa Parks was arrested, she called E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter and leader of a local chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who worked with one of his employees to help start the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. Nixon called local ministers, one of whom was the novice Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to an NPR program aired yesterday on "Morning Edition," these men who often suffered the humiliation of racism, watched the rich and successful and brought home to their sons and daughters the dream of an education. They saved their money and made college a priority. Read or listen to the remarkable story told by 93 year old Frank Rollins about how he combatted racism later in the day on "All Things Considered.

Now I will probably read Larry Tye's Rising from the Rails: The Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.

Especially to contrast it with White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won the Man Booker Award and I just finished. In both books, although one non-fiction and the other fiction, eavesdropping on the rich is the theme. For the porters, the men learned that education was the key to success in America. For Adiga in India, although success comes from learning from the rich, growth of an admirable character certainly wasn't a factor. I highly recommend White Tiger.