Pullman porters' legacy

By Larry Tye  |  February 21, 2006

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."