[Mb-civic] FASCINATING: Pullman porters' legacy - Larry Tye - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Pullman porters' legacy

By Larry Tye  |  February 21, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ELAINE JONES had the jitters. Anyone would her first week of law school, 
especially one as formidable as the University of Virginia. But Jones 
faced challenges that no other beginning student could even imagine. She 
was one of only seven women in the class of 1970, with 184 men. She was 
also black.

Since Thomas Jefferson founded the law school in 1826, only a handful of 
African-American women had applied, and a staggering total of none had 
been admitted. Jones would be the first. This great-granddaughter of a 
slave was a role model not just for her younger brother and sister, but 
for all the black men and women who dared to dream of a life at the bar.

Having just purchased her first-year textbooks, Jones retreated to one 
of the few settings men were not allowed: the ladies room in the law 
library. She settled into the tattered sofa, paging through the thick 
volumes and summoning the strength to play her role as race pioneer. 
Just then, the dean's secretary walked in and, spying Jones, seized the 
opportunity to boss her. ''I know you're taking your rest break now," 
the pink-cheeked white woman said, ''but when you're finished, would you 
mind cleaning up the refrigerator?"

By the time she realized what happened -- that she had been mistaken for 
one of the maids, the only other black women on the law school campus -- 
the secretary was gone. Jones was ever so alone, but she could clearly 
hear two voices, the way she always did in such circumstances. The 
first, her college-educated mother's, instructed her to ''put those 
books down and go find that woman." Next was her father, whose higher 
learning consisted of 19 years as a Pullman porter. ''That's not right," 
he whispered. ''You'll get your time."

''That second one is the one I listened to," Jones recalled 35 years 
later, sitting in a conference room at the suite of offices she oversaw 
during her 11 years as president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the 
nation's oldest, most esteemed civil rights law firm. ''I acted on that 
voice a whole lot of times."

Her father's message was less of caution than biding time. It was to 
rise above slights, to show she was better by doing better, the way her 
father had preached since she was a schoolgirl sitting around Sunday 
dinners of chicken smothered in gravy. And the way G.R. Jones had 
behaved himself during the nearly two decades he polished cuspidors and 
pacified riders on George Pullman's sleeping cars, salting away salary 
and tips to put three children through college and graduate school. It 
was a code of practice common among the 20,000 black men who worked as 
porters from the end of the Civil War, when George Pullman recruited 
former slaves to care for his white passengers, to the late 1960s, when 
the sleepers stopped running.

There are a variety of reasons to remember the Pullman porter during 
Black History Month. He was the patriarch of black labor, founding the 
first successful African-American trade union. He helped orchestrate the 
civil rights struggle, bailing Rosa Parks out of jail, tapping the Rev. 
Martin Luther King Jr. to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, and 
bankrolling the early movement.

But the most lasting legacy of G.R. Jones and his fellow porters was 
such activists as NAACP boss Roy Wilkins, political leaders like Mayor 
Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, artists like jazz great Oscar Peterson, and 
all their other children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, who run 
universities and municipalities, sit on corporate and editorial boards, 
and helped spawn and shape today's black professional class. Name an 
African-American who excelled in any field the last half century, and 
there is an odds-on chance they had a Pullman porter in their past. Not 
bad for a group of men who at their height made up 0.1 percent of 
African-Americans, and who embodied servility.

Today, most Americans recall only the Pullman porter's constant smile 
and courtly service, seeing them as Uncle Toms. In truth, G.R. Jones's 
daughter, Elaine, says, ''They were survivors. They had to survive 
within the limited economic framework they had so we could survive and 
sit here and call them Toms."

Larry Tye is author of ''Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the 
Making of the Black Middle Class."  

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/21/pullman_porters_legacy/
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