America's golden age of train travel often conjures up images of a glamorous, bygone era known for plush seats, gourmet dining cars, and spacious sleeping cabins—the epitome of which was the Pullman sleeper car. What might not come to mind is the skilled and industrious workforce behind that white-glove hospitality: the Pullman porters.
For nearly a hundred years, Pullman porters helped define train travel in the U.S. Their diligence, attention to detail, and impeccable service helped make the Pullman Palace Car Company the most desirable method of travel during the heyday of passenger rail travel. Founded shortly after the end of the American Civil War in 1867 by George Pullman, the Pullman Company popularized sleeping car train travel in America—for the white middle and upper class—by offering luxury sleeper cars and high-end service from Pullman porters.
Pullman porters were almost exclusively Black men hired to attend to the needs of white passengers. They performed tasks such as shining shoes, ironing clothes, stowing luggage, and bringing food to patrons, who often called them “boy” or “George”—a reference to the founder’s first name. During the 1920s, more than 20,000 African Americans worked for the company, making it the largest single employer of African Americans in the U.S. at that time.
"It was like working as a glorified butler," says Annie Mathews, whose father, Robert Wesley McGhee, Sr., worked as a Pullman porter during summer months for nearly 40 years. During the rest of the year, McGhee was a high school Latin teacher in Memphis; when school was out, he worked to supplement his income on the Canadian Pacific Railway route from Niagara Falls to Vancouver, which required him to learn French for service stops in Montreal and Québec. As he worked the route, McGhee was frequently called racial slurs by customers, according to Mathews.
There were other forms of disrespect, too. In order to receive their full salaries, porters were obligated to meet a quota of either 400 hours or 11,000 miles per month. This steep requirement often forced porters to work 20-hour shifts with no more than four hours of sleep. They also had to pay for their own food and uniforms, and since wages were extremely low, they relied heavily on tips from passengers.
To address these harsh working conditions, the Pullman porters formed the nation’s first all-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), in 1925 through which they signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company in 1937. Led by A. Philip Randolph, who was also a key organizer of the the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the labor union was influential to the Civil Rights Movement, and Randolph used its power to demand social changes for Black people throughout the U.S.
“By the time he founded the BSCP in 1925, Randolph was widely recognized as the leading voice for the Black working class,” says William Pretzer, Senior Curator of History at the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Through leveraging his position as vice president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s premier labor organization, “Randolph and others arranged for the organization to support the 1963 march, an inflection point in the Civil Rights Movement that ultimately contributed to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Pretzer says. In addition, porters like E.D. Nixon, who was also head of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, worked with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. to initiate the Montgomery bus boycott.
Despite the grueling and demeaning work, the job of Pullman porter was seen as highly desirable in the Black community because wages were generally higher than most that Black men earned in other occupations, like the back-breaking work of sharecropping—a common form of labor at the time. Porters also had the opportunity to travel the country during an era when most Black people could not.
Because of their mobility and expertise, Pullman porters were “inspirational conductors of an overground railroad,” says Pretzer. In an era before interstate highways and commercial flights, rail travel took millions of African Americans from the South, where Jim Crow laws made life especially unbearable, to northern cities like Chicago during the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970. "Porters offered sage advice about traveling via the train—the essential transportation system for African Americans to flee the South.”
Pullman porters also disseminated information from the Black press by transporting copies of African American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, to Black towns in the South, informing their residents that places like Chicago offered more favorable living and working conditions. “They carried leaflets from northern employers offering jobs and advertisements for housing, and the magazines and records they carried provided southerners a taste of Black culture in the north,” says Pretzer.
Although Pullman's luxe sleeper cars were designed for and marketed to white travelers, the trains also hosted some Black passengers as well. “Pullman had a pressing financial interest in avoiding segregation,” says Mia Bay, author of Traveling Black. Segregation would have “required the company to provide separate cars for Black customers, which would have been prohibitively expensive given how few Black people could afford such service.”
Additionally, de facto segregation practices, such as denying Black people the ability to purchase Pullman train tickets or not honoring their purchased tickets, were enforced in some southern states to exclude most Black passengers from riding Pullman trains. There was, however, an emerging class of wealthy Black travelers—which included entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker—who had both the financial means and influence to book a place in Pullman's sleeping cars.
A’Lelia Bundles, great-great granddaughter of Madam C. J. Walker and author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, still feels a strong connection to train travel thanks to her experience with the Pullman porters in the 1950s and 1960s as she traveled with her mother, who was vice president of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. “I’ll never forget how distinguished the porters looked in their navy blue caps, crisp white shirts, and uniform jackets," Bundles says. “Their smiles always made my mother and me feel welcomed.”
In fact, Bundles's mother was a frequent Pullman passenger throughout her life. “Pullman porters would always take special care of her as she traveled between her parents’ homes in Arkansas and Indiana to and from Howard University,” Bundles says.
While rail travel carried 98 percent of all intercity passenger service in the U.S. in the early 1900s, by the 1950s, train travel had decreased sharply due to the emergence of other modes of passenger transportation. As a result, the Pullman Company ceased operations in 1968. The site of the company’s headquarters in Chicago was designated the Pullman National Monument in 2015 by the U.S. National Park Service, preserving one of the first planned industrial communities in the U.S.; it is now home to the new Pullman National Monument Visitor Center and the Pullman State Historic Site, which officially opened in August.
When Amtrak began operations in 1971, the company retained many of the Pullman porters as workers. The “Old Heads,” as they were called in the 1980s, worked with younger Amtrak employees who had little to no rail experience. “These porters imparted the demeanor and high service standards of their predecessors to the newer Amtrak crew members,” says Jason Abrams, public relations manager for Amtrak. Nearly all of the original porters retired by the 1990s, according to Abrams, but their influence on rail travel lives on today.
“Riding trains is a legacy that you see passed down from generation to generation,” says Kim Williams, the first Black woman to serve on the board of directors of the Rail Passengers Association, a rail passenger advocacy organization. In fact, many of Amtrak's existing routes are former Pullman routes that traverse cities with large African American populations stemming from the Great Migration, according to Williams.
Today, there are also Amtrak's Red Caps, a complimentary passenger assistance service heavily influenced by the former Pullman porters. Among the service’s most ardent supporters is A’Lelia Bundles, who uses a little-known travel hack to board trains before the crowds by using the Red Caps—whom she tips generously. “I always use the Red Caps because of my positive childhood memories and as an homage to my mother's respect for the Pullman porters.”