Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class by Larry Tye Henry Holt & Co., July 2004 $26, ISBN 0-805-07075-3

Servants in the public sphere, kings at home-a paradoxical yet perennial theme in the story of black life in America's complicated narrative of race. Journalist Larry Tye adds his thread to the dark tapestry in his uneven book, Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. Two contrasts in the book are striking, the first is effective, the second extremely disappointing. Readers may contrast the extremely detailed story of George Pullman, who thought to hire dark skinned, recently freed Southern men to serve his clients, against the sketchy details of the first unknown porter-everyman, and marvel at the anonymity that makes him so salient a black icon

Yet, the contrast between Pullman, the calculating industrialist, who may or may not have been racist (Tye's words), against A. Philip Randolph, the gadfly who met his perfect cause through rabble rousing and rhetoric during the pilgrimage to Harlem that all our heroes were required to take, does not ring true.

The book's strongest chapters come in the center, where Tye does an impressive job of outlining the daily lives of the porters and the ridiculous attention to detail that the opulent setting required. "The line between selling oneself and maximizing tips, that is, between slavery and economic freedom-was very thin." Though, it's not a surprising fact about a large employer in a land of few opportunities, the book has a nice touch in including quotes from porters we came to love.

Tye does not do a good job of recreating the drama surrounding A. Philip Randolph, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the first recognized Black union. Where Tye fails, I believe, is to give the delicate treatment necessary to so complicated a character as the black porter in black history. Yet when he does, in the end, it is one of our greatest mouthpieces, former porter Malcolm X, who translates the actions contemporary blacks may find a bit distressing, even as they understand them as necessary, "It didn't take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they'd buy anything you offered them. It was like popping your shoeshine rag. The dining car waiters and Pullman porters knew it too, and they faked their Uncle Tomming to get bigger tips. We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained."

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Reviewed by Shatema Threadcraft

Shatema Threadcraft is a first year Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Yale University.