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People
Rail Conflict
: Pullman Porters and Maids
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Rail Conflict
 Respect on the Railroads
Pullman Palace Car Co
Separate But Not Equal
Pullman Porters and Maids: High Status Jobs or One Step up from Slavery?
By David Jepsen & Patricia Pierce Erikson
Leon Long had the best of jobs and the worst of jobs. On one hand, his job earned him great respect in his own community. On the other hand, he was treated as an "errand boy." This meant he cleaned "spittoons" or buckets where people could spit in public. He shined shoes and was hated by many of his customers. On good days, he made a dollar or two in tips. On bad days, customers insulted him based on his skin color.
Leon Long was a sleeping car porter on the railroad. In return for his work he earned under $70 a month, plus tips, and four days off a month. Porters like Leon had to buy meals, lodging, and uniforms with their salary.
Leon Long, whose father was a porter and former slave, said he had to work hard to please his passengers and earn a good tip at by the end of the trip. "You got to treat the passenger nice, you got to take care of them. You got to be their nurse, doctor. You got to be the maid. You got to be everything," he said.
In spite of the benefits, railroad work was hard and often demeaning. "Railroad companies could be harsh employers, demanding long hours under poor conditions for low pay." Leon Long often worked 18-hour days, sleeping only after his passengers retired for the night. Porters seldom had their own bed, sleeping instead in the gentlemen’s lounge, where white passengers came in and out throughout the night.
The Pullman Porter legacy is ambiguous to many African Americans. Many were understandably proud of the success of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porter union under A. Philip Randolph. However, porter work was demeaning to the often highly-educated African Americans who held these positions only because other employment appropriate for their educational level was unavailable due to racial discrimination. Even though the job afforded steady work, especially in the Great Depression, what did it mean if a young, African American man who had a college degree had been reduced to shining shoes on the train? To be sure, those with such an education were a minority, but the fact that they existed at all reflects the power of systematic and long-standing discrimination.
By the 1930s, few porters wished that their sons or daughters would follow their employment path. African American willingness to work hard to provide for their families - and especially to encourage them to go to college - when they and others fought for the end of employment discrimination, speaks to their desire to get their children, if not themselves, beyond the trains.
1. Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989, 69.
2. Porter wages are difficult to pinpoint because they varied based on years of service and increased over time. In the late nineteenth century, a porter earned less than $30 a month. Wages increased to about $67 in 1925, and then again to $89.50 following the union agreement in 1937. Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 90-5.
3. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, 82-3.
4. Eric Arnesen, "Like Banquo’s Ghost, It Will Not Down: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920," in American Historical Review, December 1994, 1610.
Copyright © 2007-2008 Washington State Historical Society
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This 1928 photograph by Asahel Curtis shows a waiter serving two men on a St. Paul Railroad passenger train.
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In addition to hiring African American porters, the Pullman Car Company hired women as maids.
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Jack Delano took this photograph of Pullman porter Alfred MacMillan. To find out how black workers organized their own unions, click on the image above.
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