RISING FROM THE RAILS:

Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

by Larry Tye

“[A] highly readable business history at one end and labor history at the other . . .
entertaining detail abounds. . . . So does informing detail.” Publishers Weekly

“A reasoned assessment of the Pullman porter’s role in black America. . . . They may have been
invisible men to their patrons, but Tye makes the case for the porters as revolutionary
elements within black society.” Kirkus Reviews

“If race is the story of America, the Pullman porter represents one of its most resonant
chapters.” So begins Larry Tye’s RISING FROM THE RAILS: Pullman Porters and the
Making of the Black Middle Class (Henry Holt and Company; July 6, 2004; $26.00), which
chronicles the stories of hundreds of black men who worked for George Pullman on his
luxurious overnight trains from the end of the Civil War, when Pullman hired as porters ex-
slaves whom he felt embodied servility, to 1969, when the Pullman Company terminated its
sleeping car service. Veteran reporter Larry Tye interviewed more than 40 surviving porters and
other black railroad workers, using their stories as a prism to help us understand the evolution of
race relations in America over a complete century.

In the 1920s, the Pullman Company was the largest employer of African-American men, and the
job of sleeping car porter was the most cherished in the black world. Pullman porters served as
maids, waiters, concierges, nannies, and occasionally doctors and undertakers. But behind their
courtly service lay a day-to-day struggle for dignity that anticipated black America’s bloody
crawl towards equity. And unbeknownst to most of their white passengers, porters played
critical political and cultural roles, bringing seditious ideas about freedom from the urban North
to the segregated South, carrying jazz and blues from big cities to outlying burgs, forming
America’s first black trade union, and serving as stalwarts of the African-American community. Their most
lasting legacy, however, lay in activists like NAACP boss Roy Wilkins, political leaders like Los Angeles
Mayor Tom Bradley, artists like jazz great Oscar Peterson, and all their other children and grandchildren,
nephews and nieces, who run universities and municipalities, sit on corporate and editorial boards, and
helped give birth to today’s black middle class.

The Pullman porter’s story has special resonance now, as America celebrates the 50th anniversary of the
landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the 40th anniversary of the historic March on
Washington. The lead attorney in the Brown case, Thurgood Marshall, once worked on the railroads and
his father was a train porter, while the lead organizer of the civil rights march, A. Philip Randolph, was
president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Another Pullman porter, Edgar D. Nixon, launched
the Montgomery bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement – and tapped Martin Luther King Jr. to
lead both.

Larry Tye’s tale of the Pullman porter is a story of black men not just riding along the rails, but rising from
them. It is a quintessentially American story of how a minority finds a foothold in the workplace and the
nation’s psyche.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

LARRY TYE was a longtime reporter for The Boston Globe, where he won numerous awards. He now
directs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard
University, Tye is also the author of The Father of Spin and Home Lands. He can be reached online at
larrytye.com

RISING FROM THE RAILS

Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class
by Larry Tye
Henry Holt and Company
336 pages * ISBN 0-8050-7075-3 * $26.00