"Porters offered sage advice about traveling via the train-the essential transportation system for African Americans to flee the South.”Ī Kuppenheimer Good Cloths ad featuring a Pullman porter Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureĪlthough Pullman's luxe sleeper cars were designed for and marketed to white travelers, the trains also hosted some Black passengers as well. 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 also had the opportunity to travel the country during an era when most Black people could not.īecause of their mobility and expertise, Pullman porters were “inspirational conductors of an overground railroad,” says Pretzer.
A Pullman porter carrying bags, in a a scene from A Journey by Train Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultureĭespite 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.
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