Smithsonian train exhibit preserves lost history of Jim Crow South | McClatchy Washington Bureau

The Pullman Co. ID card on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture tells the story of the opportunities, and limitations, the descendants of slaves found working on the railroad.

The ID belonged to Thomas McCord, a Pullman porter based out of Union Station in Louisville, Kentucky. The ID indicates he was born in January 1886, and shows his face in a fuzzy, black-and-white photo taken during World War II. It is likely he’d been attending to sleeping car passengers’ needs for many years.

But one thing hadn’t changed during that time: Although McCord worked in one of the premier jobs black men could have in the period between the Civil War and the civil rights era, his own family members had to use separate waiting rooms and ride in separate train car compartments on the very railroad that provided him a living.

White passengers probably addressed McCord as “George” — as in George Pullman, the founder of the company that built the passenger cars. The porters all had their own names, but were required to answer to “George.”

Despite the indignities, hard work and low pay, the job was less physically taxing than farm or factory work and gave black men the opportunity to see other parts of the country, said Larry Tye, who wrote a book about the Pullman porters, “Rising From the Rails.”

Along with the postal service, it was one of the jobs that helped build the black middle class in America, Tye said.

“It was better money and kind of work than most blacks could get,” he said. “It was on so many levels an opportunity for them.”

The Pullman porters were also key figures in the civil rights movement.

E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter in Montgomery, Alabama, helped organize the bus boycott in 1955, and asked a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to lead it.

In 1925, A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the very first black trade union, and served as its president. Randolph would be named chairman of the 1963 March on Washington, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Tye calls Randolph “the grandfather” of the civil rights movement.

Behind the case containing McCord’s ID, one of the smaller objects in the museum’s collection, is one of the larger ones: a full-size train coach car, Southern Railway 1200.

The 44-seat car was built by Pullman Co. in 1918, and roamed the Southern’s sprawling 6,000-mile system that wove through states such as Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

In 1940, Southern shop employees in Spartanburg, South Carolina, retrofitted the 1200 to split the car into two sections, the one in front for white passengers, and the section in the back for “colored” passengers.

Contractors in Stearns, Kentucky, spent two years restoring the car to its 1940 appearance before it was moved to the museum in 2014.

Michele Gates Moresi, curator of collections at the museum, which opens to the public on Saturday, said the section for black passengers, and the restroom they could use, are smaller.

“The differences are subtle, not stark,” she said. “The ‘colored’ section is smaller.”

Spencer Crew, a professor of U.S. history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said that it cost railroads more to provide separate accommodations in Southern states in accordance with Jim Crow laws there, but they couldn’t risk offending the cultural sensibilities of their important freight customers.

“They weren’t happy to have segregated cars,” Crew said, “but they weren’t willing to buck Southern tradition.”

Ironically, by the time civil rights legislation had dismantled segregation laws in the south, intercity passenger trains were in a death spiral. The traveling public had abandoned Pullman cars for interstate highways and jumbo jets.

Amtrak picked up the skeletal remains of the nation’s passenger train network in 1971, and the last of the Pullman porters retired from the railroad not long after.

Tye said there were about 40 or 50 former Pullman porters still living when he published the book in 2004, the youngest of whom were in their 80s at the time.

While few porters are still living, their descendants have achieved stature in public life.

The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was the son of a Pullman porter. So is former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is the grandson of one.

“There are very few people who are prominent African-Americans who didn’t have a relative who was a porter,” Tye said.