Rising from the Rails Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

hen George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars, the former slaves suffering under Jim Crow laws found his offer of a steady job and worldly experience irresistable. They quickly signed up to serve as maid, waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African Americans in the country by the 1920s. Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the complicated world of the Pullman porter and the vital cultural, political, and economic roles they played as forerunners of the modern black middle class. Rising from the Rails provides a lively and enlightening look at this important social phenomenon.

A longtime journalist for The Boston Globe, Larry Tye has won numerous awards for his work. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, he is the author of The Father of Spin (0-8050-6789-2) and Home Lands (0-8050-6591-1). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.