(The following story by Jonathan Pitts appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on February 27.)
BALTIMORE, Med. — Thirty-three years ago, when E. Donald Hughes II was a bright, athletic young man just starting out in college, his father made a suggestion he considered an insult.
E. Donald Hughes Sr. was a Pullman porter, one of the thousands of African-American men since the Civil War who made their living serving the mostly white passengers on the sleeper cars attached to American trains.
“I know you’re uppity, trying for a college degree and all that,” the elder Hughes told him. “But you can make good money in tips. And believe me, a sleeping-car porter has to use his brain.”
The younger Hughes didn’t know much about his dad – the old man was often away on runs for weeks at a time, and they rarely spoke – but he did know that even in 1975, porters were still shining shoes, and the whole scene seemed a demeaning exercise from a bygone time.
Still, he needed a part-time job. He signed on for weekend runs on the Southern Railway, becoming part of a 100-year chapter in American history that soon would be no more.
On Monday, E. Donald Hughes II, 53, an Elkridge resident, celebrated that history. As part of its salute to Black History Month, Amtrak brought Hughes and two other former porters to Union Station in Washington, where they basked in the attention of more than 100 well-wishers at a formal ceremony.
As Hughes stood up to address the crowd, he sounded very much like a man whose perspective three decades ago had changed.
“I’m honored to be a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” he said as cameras clicked. “Railroads built this country, and the dedication of the humble sleeping-car porter made it possible. … If you don’t understand your own history, you’ll never understand who you really are.”
‘Ph.D. in servitude’
Hughes’ own lesson began, in a way, 91 years before he was born, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The act freed the slaves – and drew the notice of an American industrialist and inventor named George Mortimer Pullman.
A year earlier, Pullman had designed the first luxury overnight railroad car, a 60-foot-long contraption with carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs and other unheard-of amenities, not to mention fold-out beds. All he needed to complete his lucrative fleet of moving hotels was the sort of four-star service his well-heeled guests would expect.
“Pullman had this suddenly available pool of men who already had what amounted to a Ph.D. in servitude,” says Larry Tye, author of Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. “They were looking for employment, he needed them, and he barely had to pay them a salary.”
For the next century, as the Pullman Co. leased as many as 9,800 cars to the nation’s railroads, the men who serviced them – shining shoes, cleaning spittoons, babysitting children – were virtually all black males, their jobs handed down generation to generation within families. At one point in the 1920s, more than 20,000 African-Americans worked for the railroads, with Pullman employing more blacks than any other company.
Porters’ wages were low – they had to work 400 hours a month or 11,000 miles, whichever came first, to be paid at all – but with tips, they could earn more than the vast majority of American blacks. They enjoyed what amounted to a middle-class lifestyle and were seen in their communities as pillars of success, even rectitude.
Not so on the trains. Passengers and conductors regularly called porters “boy” or used racial epithets. Worse, all were addressed as “George,” for George Pullman, harking back to an era in which slaves were referred to by the names of their masters. They could be sent out for weeks at a time or fired without redress.
“The conditions were abominable,” says Hughes, who started studying the history of Pullman porters more than a decade after his own last run in 1978. “They had to be strong men – and many were very spiritual men – to endure such abuse.”
In 1925, a group of porters contacted a labor organizer, a New York pamphleteer named A. Philip Randolph, to represent their interests. For 10 years, he fought the Pullman Co., the all-white American labor industry, and even fellow porters who feared losing their jobs. In 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s first African-American labor union, won a collective bargaining agreement from mighty Pullman.
Randolph didn’t stop there. Four years later, threatening a march on Washington, he pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to sign an executive order banning racial discrimination in the federal work force. Two decades after that, at 74, he put his contacts and organization to use again, spearheading the 1963 March on Washington, at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became a household name.
In the 1990s, as a docent at the B&O Railroad Museum, Hughes soaked up everything he could on the man who would become his hero.
Largely thanks to Randolph – a bronze statue of whom flanks the Starbucks at Union Station – Hughes’ duties were never as onerous as he’d feared or as grueling as his forebears’. By the time he came along in the 1970s, working hours were reasonable, the hourly wage was about $7, and passengers, prompted by the name tags porters now wore, called him “Mr. Hughes.”
Technically, he was never a Pullman porter. The Pullman Co. stopped leasing sleepers in 1968. Hughes worked similar cars on the Southern Crescent, the last independently owned passenger train in the United States, as it rolled between Washington and Atlanta and – when time allowed – New York and New Orleans.
“I showered my passengers with love, attention and service,” he says wistfully. “As a porter, you were confidant, waiter, entertainer, babysitter, information desk. If you had a family on the car, you’d sing to the kids or tell jokes. You’d tell the grown-ups history, or share what you knew about places we stopped, or just talk if you had a moment. At the end of the line, you’d put your hand out. I have to say, I usually did very well.”
There were remnants of the bad old days. Each night, passengers left shoes outside their rooms to be shined – a chore he grew to accept, in part because of the tricks shared by his father, who died in 1984. If a pair wasn’t badly scuffed, for instance, he could often get his tip by merely turning the shoes around. But once in a while, a wiseacre left him a pair of mud-caked clodhoppers.
“Even then, I did my best,” says Hughes, who never held another railroad job and now works in information technology at the Library of Congress. “I was a sleeping-car porter. They looked better when I was done with them, I’ll tell you that.”
Few porters left
There aren’t many of the old porters left. Two years ago, Amtrak set out to track down as many as they could up and down the Eastern seaboard. They came up with Hughes; Bill Costen, 61, of Hartford, Conn.; and Thomas Dunn, 81, of Washington, a former dining-car cook. Amtrak honored the trio with crystal figurines Monday.
When Tye wrote his book in 2004, he found and interviewed 40 ex-Pullman porters. Since then, more than half have passed away. “An era is rapidly coming to an end,” he says.
What heartens students of the era is the legacy they left. Tye argues that many of the brightest, most resourceful African-American men of their time – from filmmaker Oscar Micheaux to Malcolm X, who sold sandwiches on trains in the 1940s – worked as or alongside Pullman porters. And they bequeathed to later generations a strong work ethic and a profound sense of self-worth.
“An extraordinary number of the black professional class are their offspring,” Tye says.
And then there are the stories. If Hughes closes his eyes, he can summon memories of every station from New York on south – from Philadelphia through Charlottesville, Va., from Salisbury, N.C., to Birmingham, Ala., and right on into the Crescent City, where he enjoyed the occasional jaw-dropping night on Bourbon Street.
“I was young,” he says. “I had money in my pocket, a place to sleep and wonderful food in the dining car, and I was seeing America. I didn’t realize it till years later, but it was the best job I’ve had.”
He has long since forgiven his father.