Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly fry So Holly. When you
Speaker 1: took uh like U S history classes that talked about
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights movement, do you feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of the focus was on the things that African Americans
Speaker 1: were not allowed to do? So like almost the entigrity
Speaker 1: of the focus, so like being barred from the schools,
Speaker 1: in the restrooms and other whites only places, being kept
Speaker 1: from voting, being denied legal protections that white people really
Speaker 1: took for granted. Like all of that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: feels like a big part of the context for the
Speaker 1: Civil Rights movement in history classes in the United States,
Speaker 1: for sure. So there's actually a whole other part of
Speaker 1: that equation, which is the things that only Africa and
Speaker 1: Americans were allowed to do. There were jobs that used
Speaker 1: an entirely black workforce as a way to subjugate people
Speaker 1: and maintain a racial status quo. I only became aware
Speaker 1: that this was a thing, like as an adult, Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. I definitely do not recall ever having that
Speaker 1: as part of a class well, and even having having
Speaker 1: taken uh in an entire class on social movements, a
Speaker 1: third of which was devoted to the civil rights movement
Speaker 1: in college. I don't think that's something that we really
Speaker 1: got into UM. But today we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: one of these jobs, which was the sleeping car porter.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen twenties, sleeping car porters unionized and they
Speaker 1: successfully fought for better pay and working conditions. Their union,
Speaker 1: which was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, became the
Speaker 1: first African American labor union to be recognized by the
Speaker 1: American Federation of the Labor. While the union started out
Speaker 1: campaigning for more money and better treatment for its members,
Speaker 1: it became an important force for social change during the
Speaker 1: American Civil Rights movement. But before we talk about the
Speaker 1: porters and their unions specifically, we need to just talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about trains, because it's important to contextualize
Speaker 1: where all this was going on. So, by the end
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, the railroad was basically the easiest
Speaker 1: and fastest way to travel long distances in the United States.
Speaker 1: But until an industrialist named George Pullman put his stamp
Speaker 1: on the sleeping car, the trip wasn't really comfortable, particularly
Speaker 1: if you had to travel overnight. Uh that's actually still
Speaker 1: true today. Yes, I've made multiple trips by train from
Speaker 1: Atlanta to Washington, d C. That we're all overnight and
Speaker 1: it's not comfortable. I had a sleeping car one time,
Speaker 1: and that was marginally more comfortable, but still not the
Speaker 1: like total luxury experience that it became uh in in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth cent So, the Pullman Company put out its
Speaker 1: first sleeper car in eighteen sixty five. These cars featured
Speaker 1: really beautiful and comfortable furnishings. There were berths that converted
Speaker 1: from seats and folded down from the walls. But what
Speaker 1: really set Pullman cars apart from the other sleeper cars
Speaker 1: on the market was their staff of porters, the first
Speaker 1: of whom was hired in eighteen sixty seven. Railroad lines
Speaker 1: who wanted to have Pullman cars as part of their
Speaker 1: trains leased them from the Pulling Company, and a staff
Speaker 1: of maids and porters came along as part of the package.
Speaker 1: And the porter's work was really what made the Pullman
Speaker 1: cars a true luxury experience. They had an exceptional reputation
Speaker 1: for quality and service. The porters would make down the
Speaker 1: beds at night and they would make them back up
Speaker 1: again in the morning. They would brush travelers coats, they
Speaker 1: would polish shoes, They served meals and beverages, and basically
Speaker 1: attended to every need a passenger might have throughout their journey,
Speaker 1: including looking after and clear eating up after sick passengers
Speaker 1: like They took care of people in every possible way,
Speaker 1: and porters were even responsible for the safety and security
Speaker 1: of passengers, including children, And for almost a hundred years,
Speaker 1: they were also exclusively African American. Many of the earliest
Speaker 1: Pullman porters were recently freed slaves, and as the years
Speaker 1: wore on, the Pullman Company made a concerted effort of
Speaker 1: hiring most of its porters out of the Deep South.
Speaker 1: Once hired, the workers mostly worked out of northern railroad
Speaker 1: hub cities, especially Chicago, and George Pullman got a great
Speaker 1: deal of praise at the time for employing so many
Speaker 1: black workers, but his motives were not philanthropic, and he
Speaker 1: did not try to disguise that fact. He chose African
Speaker 1: American labor for his sleeping cars because he knew he
Speaker 1: would get a workforce that was grateful to have a
Speaker 1: job and would be willing to accept low pay. And
Speaker 1: we're grueling hours. He expected newly freed slaves to be
Speaker 1: used to being subservient to white people, and the white
Speaker 1: passengers were also accustomed to having African Americans around as
Speaker 1: a servant class. Uh So, African Americans, for context, could
Speaker 1: ride these trains, but they had to ride in segregated cars,
Speaker 1: and they certainly were not allowed to ride in sleeper cars. Yes,
Speaker 1: so it was basically an exclusively black workforce waiting on
Speaker 1: a almost exclusively uh white customer base. By the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: more than twenty thousand African American men were employed as
Speaker 1: pullman porters and other train personnel. The Pullman Company became
Speaker 1: the largest employer of African American men and the United States.
Speaker 1: There were also African American maids who worked on the trains.
Speaker 1: Um There was about one made for every fifty porters
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen twenties, and the job of a
Speaker 1: pullman porter was actually a highly coveted one, and porters
Speaker 1: were very well respected within their home communities. The job
Speaker 1: did not require a lot of heavy manually, which was
Speaker 1: rare among jobs for African American men, and porters got
Speaker 1: to travel all over and so they became sources of
Speaker 1: information about jobs and news when they would travel back home,
Speaker 1: and they also, as a consequence, wound up being the
Speaker 1: company's best recruiters because they would return home with stories
Speaker 1: of adventure and travel, and they would have pockets full
Speaker 1: of tips. So it looked like a very glamorous, uh
Speaker 1: you know, really pretty cushy job to a lot of people, Yes,
Speaker 1: but in reality, porters worked extremely long hours for not
Speaker 1: much money. A pullman porter in the twenties had to
Speaker 1: work four hundred hours or travel eleven thousand miles in
Speaker 1: a month, whichever came first, to earn his full pay.
Speaker 1: So if you're doing math in your head right now,
Speaker 1: that is thirteen to fourteen hours a day every day
Speaker 1: with zero days off during the month, or about two
Speaker 1: round trips all the way across the country from New
Speaker 1: York to San Francisco. The base salary for this work
Speaker 1: was about eight hundred and seventeen dollars a year, and
Speaker 1: then in twenties. UM, I look at a bunch of
Speaker 1: different ways to calculate how much this means today, and
Speaker 1: they are widely Yeah, it's hard to do the transliteration
Speaker 1: on yeah. Yeah. So if if you really really want
Speaker 1: a number, we can call it about twenty two dollars
Speaker 1: for thirty or thirty one, thirteen or fourteen hour days minimum.
Speaker 1: And I was winding earlier about how angry I get
Speaker 1: just harming to get up in the morning. Most porters
Speaker 1: actually made more in tips than they did in salary,
Speaker 1: and added together this these two incomes often made up
Speaker 1: for more money than many other jobs open to African Americans,
Speaker 1: but it was much much less than white people could
Speaker 1: make in other pullman company jobs. For example, porters made
Speaker 1: much less than the conductors, who were all white, yet
Speaker 1: they often had to do the work of the conductor.
Speaker 1: Porters also had to spend a lot of their pay
Speaker 1: on things that they needed for work, including food, uniforms,
Speaker 1: and shoe polish. They also had to pay for their
Speaker 1: own lodging during layovers, and if passengers walked off with
Speaker 1: columns or towels or other small items, as often happens
Speaker 1: in any kind of situation like that, it was stocked
Speaker 1: from the porter's pay. And then there were uh parts
Speaker 1: of the job that were really quite frankly degrading. For example,
Speaker 1: the porter's blankets were never allowed to be mixed with
Speaker 1: the passengers blankets in the wash and to achieve this,
Speaker 1: they were color coded, so the porter's blankets were blue
Speaker 1: and the passengers blankets were sort of salmon color. When
Speaker 1: the passenger blankets started to wear out and become unfit
Speaker 1: for use, they would be dyed blue, and then those
Speaker 1: worn out blankets would be given to the porters. The
Speaker 1: porters didn't get to use these blankets much though. Most
Speaker 1: of them got to sleep a maximum of three hours
Speaker 1: a night, and that really was a maximum. They were
Speaker 1: thirty nights when they didn't sleep at all. We're using
Speaker 1: the thirteen to fourteen hour a day number is an average.
Speaker 1: In reality, their word days off and they be working
Speaker 1: more like twenty one hours in a day for most
Speaker 1: of their working time. Um, so they did not get
Speaker 1: a lot of sleep. They also had no berths assigned
Speaker 1: to them. Porters usually had to sleep on couches in
Speaker 1: the smoking car behind a screen, and they were not
Speaker 1: allowed to clear the car so that they could sleep.
Speaker 1: Porters were also required to answer to the name of
Speaker 1: George uh. This was a holdover from when slaves were
Speaker 1: referred to by their master's names, and just as often
Speaker 1: they were called not by a name at all, but
Speaker 1: by a racial slur. That we are not interested in
Speaker 1: repeating here. Uh, you probably guess what it is. And
Speaker 1: it was pretty much a given that calling a porter
Speaker 1: George meant the same thing as using that slur. Because
Speaker 1: of segregation, it was also entirely possible for porters to
Speaker 1: have no safe place to sleep and nowhere to get
Speaker 1: food during layovers, and the company really didn't do anything
Speaker 1: to compensate for that. Porters who tried to address any
Speaker 1: of these issues at the company faced retaliation in the
Speaker 1: form of being randed troublemakers or even just fired. So
Speaker 1: the porters, uh, you know, recognizing that there were conditions
Speaker 1: about their work that they would like a change, tried
Speaker 1: to unionize three times between nineteen o nine and nineteen thirteen.
Speaker 1: None of these was successful, but the company realized that
Speaker 1: had a problem, so it started its own union, the
Speaker 1: Pullman Porter's Benefit Association, in nineteen fifteen. It's first chairman,
Speaker 1: Arthur A. Wells, was actually George Pullman's personal assistant and
Speaker 1: his attendant in his private car. The company also established
Speaker 1: the Employee Representation Plan in nineteen twenty, which was purportedly
Speaker 1: to focus on getting better pay. It docked the money
Speaker 1: to fund this plan out of the porter's salaries, so
Speaker 1: it had basically the company recognized its labor issue quote
Speaker 1: and then tried to address it by making this kind
Speaker 1: of company run union. And this wasn't the only time
Speaker 1: that the Pullman Company had really taken the bull by
Speaker 1: the horns to try to solve labor problems. In eighteen eighty,
Speaker 1: the Pullman Company built the town of Pullman, which was
Speaker 1: south of Chicago, as worker housing, and from the outside
Speaker 1: it really looked like a wholesome place to live, but
Speaker 1: the company controlled everything about it, down to what books
Speaker 1: the library could have. It was a dry town and
Speaker 1: the only place that served alcohol was a hotel, but
Speaker 1: you can only get alcohol there if you were a
Speaker 1: guest and not a resident of the town. So when
Speaker 1: a depression started in eighteen ninety four and residents couldn't
Speaker 1: afford to live on what was left after the company
Speaker 1: payroll deducted their rent, it contributed to a strike that
Speaker 1: was so bad the federal government had to intervene. George
Speaker 1: Pullman's relationship with his employees was contentious enough that when
Speaker 1: he died in eighteen ninety seven, he left instructions that
Speaker 1: he be entombed in steel and concrete so that disgremal
Speaker 1: employees could not desecrate his body. Yeah, that's that's an
Speaker 1: adversarial relationship, quite adversiveate extremely mildly well, and the town
Speaker 1: of Pullman is a fascinating story on its own. It
Speaker 1: had kind of a extremely weird Stepford quality about it.
Speaker 1: The company would come and search people's homes just because,
Speaker 1: like it was really a surveillance state for the people
Speaker 1: who were living there. Um. So back to the porters. Finally,
Speaker 1: in n a New York porter named Ashley L. Totton
Speaker 1: got four other porters together in secret, and together they
Speaker 1: approached a man named a Philip Randolph to help them
Speaker 1: start a union and to lead it once it was
Speaker 1: off the ground. A Philip Randolph had never worked for
Speaker 1: the Pullman Company, he'd never even ridden in one of
Speaker 1: its cars, but he did have a long history and
Speaker 1: a notorious reputation for labor activism. He was also a pacifist,
Speaker 1: he was an atheist, and he was a socialist. So
Speaker 1: in short, that meant that he basically had enemies everywhere,
Speaker 1: but he was an excellent advocate and he was really
Speaker 1: devoted to the cause of labor. Right at this point,
Speaker 1: he had a long history of political activity, including a
Speaker 1: very long effort to encourage African Americans to unionize and
Speaker 1: to advocate for themselves in labor issues. So after some
Speaker 1: initial reluctance, he decided to help start a union. And
Speaker 1: before we talk about the union, would you like to
Speaker 1: take a moment and talk about a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Now on to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It
Speaker 1: had its first meeting on August and it published a
Speaker 1: list of demands in The Messenger, which was a magazine
Speaker 1: that a Philip Randolph had co founded in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: Among these demands were a significant pay raise, abolishing the
Speaker 1: practice of tipping, providing adequate rest breaks, and increasing the pensions.
Speaker 1: And the porters also demanded that a name card be
Speaker 1: placed in each car so that passengers could call could
Speaker 1: call them their actual names instead of George. And it
Speaker 1: may seem kind of odd that they would want to
Speaker 1: abolished tipping, since that was a source of income, but
Speaker 1: because porter's base pay was so low, they had to
Speaker 1: be completely subservient and ingretiating to white writers at all
Speaker 1: times in the hope of getting a better tips that
Speaker 1: they were making a living wage. So abolishing tips could lessen,
Speaker 1: but not entirely remove, one of the most degrading aspects
Speaker 1: of their job. The Pullman Company met zero of these demands,
Speaker 1: and it also did not recognize the union as a
Speaker 1: legitimate organization that it would notice that would negotiate with.
Speaker 1: It started firing people who were working with the union
Speaker 1: and infiltrating union meetings with spies. And because of all
Speaker 1: the espionage that was going on on the company's part,
Speaker 1: the Brotherhood became extremely secretive. There were secret passwords, there
Speaker 1: were secret handshakes. The porter's wives were also instrumental in
Speaker 1: maintaining secrecy. Uh they formed an ancillary network to distribute
Speaker 1: information and even attend on their husband's behalf if spies
Speaker 1: were said to be present. The porter's wives eventually for
Speaker 1: what was called the Ladies Auxiliary, which campaigned, they held fundraisers.
Speaker 1: They helped keep the union members morale up during the
Speaker 1: really long effort to get official recognition, and without the
Speaker 1: Ladies Auxiliary, the Brotherhood probably would have failed. Espionage was
Speaker 1: also only one way that the company tried to outmaneuver
Speaker 1: the union. The Pullman Company started by negotiating pay raises
Speaker 1: with the in house unions try to make it look good.
Speaker 1: These were much much smaller raises than what the Union
Speaker 1: or the you know, the Brotherhood was campaigning for. It
Speaker 1: also started strategically hiring people it thought would be more compliant,
Speaker 1: and it also did its share of media spin about
Speaker 1: how well paid and well treated its employees were, including
Speaker 1: publishing articles to that effect in the black Papers. It
Speaker 1: also cooked its numbers with its own polls that it
Speaker 1: conducted to make it look like eighty five of the
Speaker 1: porters were in favor of the in House Union and
Speaker 1: not the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Borders and the Brotherhood's
Speaker 1: effort to be recognized went on for twelve extremely difficult years.
Speaker 1: There was name calling on both sides. The company branded
Speaker 1: union supporters as communists, and the union branding porters who
Speaker 1: wouldn't join as traders to their race. The company intimidated
Speaker 1: people who talked about joining and the union and intimidated
Speaker 1: people who didn't join. It was kind of an ugly
Speaker 1: fight on both sides and a lot of ways. And
Speaker 1: then in the late nineteen twenties, the union nearly collapsed
Speaker 1: following a call for a strike that never got off
Speaker 1: the ground. The Brotherhood's membership started to drop because people started,
Speaker 1: we're starting to feel really frustrated about the fact that
Speaker 1: nothing was actually changing. Membership was halved between nine and
Speaker 1: nineteen nine, and then again by nineteen thirty one. Then,
Speaker 1: thanks to the Great Depression, the threat of job loss
Speaker 1: made people even more reluctant to be involved in the union,
Speaker 1: so by nineteen thirty three it only had six hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty eight members. But in nineteen thirty four, President
Speaker 1: Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, which
Speaker 1: encouraged collective bargaining and gave the union a legal footing
Speaker 1: that it had not had before, and membership started to
Speaker 1: grow again. In the Pullman Company finally sat down with
Speaker 1: Randolph and other members of the union to negotiate for
Speaker 1: the first time. Two years later, the Pullman Company finally
Speaker 1: recognized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porders. The Brotherhood signed
Speaker 1: its first labor agreement with the company on August of
Speaker 1: that year. This agreement raised the minimum salary from seventy
Speaker 1: seven dollars and fifty cents to eighty nine dollars and
Speaker 1: fifty cents a month. That might not sound like the
Speaker 1: most monumental pay increase, but it was for two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty hours of work, not four hundred. The agreement
Speaker 1: also guaranteed sleeping time, it established a procedure for handling grievances,
Speaker 1: and gave some other benefits as well. Over the years,
Speaker 1: the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters continued to negotiate with
Speaker 1: the Pullman Company. The monthly pay, when averaged out to
Speaker 1: an hourly rate, was eventually better than that of engineers, conductors,
Speaker 1: and other railroad positions that were at that point held
Speaker 1: by white people. Working conditions improved as well. Gradually, the
Speaker 1: Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters also turned its attention to
Speaker 1: helping other labor organizations integrate the jobs that had previously
Speaker 1: been acceptable only for white people. As a side note,
Speaker 1: it was apparently an all white organization of guys named
Speaker 1: George called the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping
Speaker 1: car Porters George that convinced the Pullman Company to put
Speaker 1: name cards for the porters in the cars. These were
Speaker 1: basically white people named George who objected two the associations
Speaker 1: with their name that were happening. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like if the name Tracy had become some sort of
Speaker 1: racial slur and you and all the other Tracy said,
Speaker 1: that's not cool. I think my motivation would be a
Speaker 1: little different than than the organization's motivation was. There was
Speaker 1: probably one that they did not want to be associated
Speaker 1: with people, But they did eventually move away from the
Speaker 1: practice of just calling everyone George. So the Pullman Company
Speaker 1: made a practice of buying up a lot of its competitors,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen forty the United States Department of Justice
Speaker 1: filed an antitrust complaint against the company. In the end,
Speaker 1: the company was ordered to divest itself of either its
Speaker 1: business of operating sleeper cars or its business of building
Speaker 1: sleeper cars. If this sort of rings a bell in
Speaker 1: your mind, it was cited as a precedent in the
Speaker 1: Microsoft antitrust case. This case continued to shake out through
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, and in ninety seven Pullman formally handed
Speaker 1: over ownership of the sleeping car business to a consortium
Speaker 1: of fifty seven railroads. The Brotherhood continued to negotiate with
Speaker 1: the railroads, and by this point it was no longer
Speaker 1: an exclusively African American organization. It also represented white barbers,
Speaker 1: maids from the Philippe Means, and others working in service
Speaker 1: positions on the railroads. At about this same time, the
Speaker 1: Brotherhood and its leadership and its members also started to
Speaker 1: become a force for equal rights outside of their working life.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen forties, many African Americans moved to
Speaker 1: urban areas where defense work was in full swing because
Speaker 1: there was a huge demand for workers as part of
Speaker 1: the war effort. The problem was once they got there,
Speaker 1: African Americans often faced harassment and discrimination, and there was
Speaker 1: a federal hiring system that favored white people. Randolph and
Speaker 1: other black leaders actually met with Eleanor Roosevelt and members
Speaker 1: of the cabinet promising a protest march on Washington. On
Speaker 1: June twenty ninety one, FDR issued Executive Order eight eight
Speaker 1: zero two, which said, in part quote, I do hereby
Speaker 1: reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall
Speaker 1: be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
Speaker 1: industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
Speaker 1: After World War Two, Randolph was also part of the
Speaker 1: effort to integrate the American Army, and thanks in part
Speaker 1: to his campaigning but also to the realities of needing
Speaker 1: the black vote to win re election, President Harry S.
Speaker 1: Truman banned segregation of the armed forces through Executive Order
Speaker 1: one on July. Randolph was also a director of the
Speaker 1: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Dr
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King Jr. Gave his famous I Have a
Speaker 1: Dream speech. D. D. Nixon, whose name you may remember
Speaker 1: from our recent episode on Rosa Parks, worked on the
Speaker 1: Montgomery bus boycott. He was also a sleeping car porter,
Speaker 1: and in fact he took himself out of the running
Speaker 1: to be president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was
Speaker 1: the position that was held by Dr Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: because of his work schedule. Like Edie Nixon, other Pullman
Speaker 1: porters became civil rights activists in their own hometowns. The
Speaker 1: Brotherhood and its members had gone up against white white
Speaker 1: power structure and eventually one Because of the nature of
Speaker 1: their jobs, the porters were also acutely aware of the
Speaker 1: effects of racism and discrimination. The porters used all this
Speaker 1: experience to become important sources of information and organization throughout
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement. They also smuggled and distributed pamphlets
Speaker 1: and literature bypassing the mail system, So if you had
Speaker 1: places where corrupt mail officials were just trashing things instead
Speaker 1: of delivering them. They had a way to work around
Speaker 1: that by using this network of sleeping car porders. The
Speaker 1: railroad really dropped off as a means of travel in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties thanks to the rise of air travel
Speaker 1: and the interstate highway system. The number of pullman porters
Speaker 1: working really just dropped precipitously. There were only about three
Speaker 1: thousand of them by nineteen sixty two. And after the
Speaker 1: Civil Rights movement, and in spite of the involvement and
Speaker 1: leadership on the part of so many members, a lot
Speaker 1: of people really stopped seeing the pullman porters as the
Speaker 1: labor and civil rights champion is that they had been
Speaker 1: for so many years, and instead they remembered the part
Speaker 1: where African American porters cow town to white passengers for tips.
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the saddest things about this
Speaker 1: whole story. It really is um you have a group
Speaker 1: of people who worked so hard for so long to
Speaker 1: take and take ownership of their jobs and and to
Speaker 1: gain a measure of dignity in a job that was
Speaker 1: inherently demeaning in a lot of ways. But today, the
Speaker 1: takeaway to a lot of people is this image it's
Speaker 1: offensive really and completely mischaracterized. Yeah. Yeah, the Brotherhood of
Speaker 1: Sleeping car Porters merged with the Brotherhood of Railway airline,
Speaker 1: steamship clerks, freight handlers, express and station employees in UH.
Speaker 1: That is a very long name for basically what was
Speaker 1: a similar organization of service positions in travel. Um. And
Speaker 1: this was just because at that point there weren't really
Speaker 1: sleeping cars in that way anymore. And as for a
Speaker 1: Philip Randolph, he was awarded the Press Cudential Medal of
Speaker 1: Freedom in nineteen sixty four. He died on May sixteenth
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy nine. UM. There is a really great
Speaker 1: book called Rising from the Rails, Pullman Porters and the
Speaker 1: Making of the Black middle Class, which is by Larry Tye,
Speaker 1: and UH. One of the awesome things about it, in
Speaker 1: addition to the fact that it gives a chronology of
Speaker 1: the whole like the job of sleeping car porter and
Speaker 1: the the work of the union and and the progress
Speaker 1: that was made over the years, is that the author
Speaker 1: tracked down as many living pullman porters as he could
Speaker 1: find or their families like immediate family members and children,
Speaker 1: to talk to them about what the job was like.
Speaker 1: And about what their lives were like and about what
Speaker 1: the time was like. And so there are just so
Speaker 1: many first person accounts in this book. Um, if you
Speaker 1: were interested in it at all, Um, you you should.
Speaker 1: You should check it out and and take a look
Speaker 1: at it. It is a very interesting story with many
Speaker 1: things that we have not talked about here. Um. There's
Speaker 1: also a book called Marching Together, Women of the Brotherhood
Speaker 1: of Sleeping car Porters, which is something that we only
Speaker 1: touched on a little bit today. Um. The Sleeping car
Speaker 1: Porters are at various points also had and Maids in
Speaker 1: its name because there were also maids working on the cars.
Speaker 1: But the porters definitely get more attention in terms of
Speaker 1: historical accounts and that kind of thing. Do you also
Speaker 1: have a listener mail for us? Why? Yes, I do.
Speaker 1: This is from John and it is about our episode
Speaker 1: on the Pueblo Revolt. Hey guys, I really appreciated your
Speaker 1: Pueblo Revolt podcast and was happy to hear you guys
Speaker 1: talk about my home state of New Mexico, the Land
Speaker 1: of Enchantment. I thought you might be interested to hear
Speaker 1: some additional info I learned on a recent visit to
Speaker 1: the Akama Pueblo near Grants, New Mexico. While on tour
Speaker 1: through the Peblo, which is still alive and inhabited with residents,
Speaker 1: we went into the Spaniard church, which was built in
Speaker 1: sixteen twenty nine atop the mesa with the rest of
Speaker 1: the Pueblo structures. What I was surprised to learn while
Speaker 1: inside the stripped own church was how the Spaniards used
Speaker 1: brute force to make the Akama people construct the church
Speaker 1: with supplies gathered around the mesa. Some of the main
Speaker 1: structural pieces were very large vegas to wooden support tresses,
Speaker 1: which were gathered from atop the nearby Mount Taylor more
Speaker 1: than thirty miles away. These huge timbers were specially selected
Speaker 1: by the Spaniards and were carried on the backs of
Speaker 1: the Pueblo people all the way back to the church site.
Speaker 1: It was mentioned that because of the religious significance of
Speaker 1: these specially selected timbers, the Akama people carrying the trees
Speaker 1: were not allowed to let the timber touch the ground
Speaker 1: on the way back, otherwise they would be forced to
Speaker 1: drop the vega and head back to the mountain to
Speaker 1: find a new one to replace it. I can only
Speaker 1: imagine the difficulty in that task, especially after seeing l
Speaker 1: mal Pay the bad Land, which is a large expanse
Speaker 1: of lava flows between the Sky City Akama Pueblo and
Speaker 1: Mount Taylor, which the Akama must have had to deal
Speaker 1: with with crossing while carrying the timbers for the Spaniards.
Speaker 1: I hope this helped to give you guys a more
Speaker 1: in depth look at the pressures the Pueblo people were
Speaker 1: faced with, and I look forward to many more of
Speaker 1: your podcast. That is a kind of heartbreaking story, it is.
Speaker 1: It was also a chance for me to correctly pronounce
Speaker 1: the word Acama, which I said completely wrong in the
Speaker 1: episode because the pronunciation looked so obvious to me that
Speaker 1: I did not look it up. It happened. Um. I
Speaker 1: also mispronounced one day one and that was just because
Speaker 1: I badly tried to speak Spanish did not do a
Speaker 1: good job with it. So thank you so much, John.
Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us about this
Speaker 1: or any other episode, you can. We're at History Podcast
Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
Speaker 1: dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at
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Speaker 1: am enjoying. Pinning things to you is on Pinterest at
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Speaker 1: like to learn more about some of what we've talked
Speaker 1: about today, you can come to our website. Put the
Speaker 1: word March on Washington, which a Philip Randolph helped to coordinate.
Speaker 1: Put that in the search bar and you will find
Speaker 1: how the March on Washington worked. You can learn all
Speaker 1: of that and a whole lot more at our website,
Speaker 1: which is how stuff works dot com. Mm hmmm mm
Speaker 1: it beat it, beat woten, other bother the bootl but
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