| Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey |  | Author: Theodore Kornweibel Jr.
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
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Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 497,770
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 568
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.2
Dimensions (in): 10 x 8.8 x 1.6
ISBN: 0801891620
Dewey Decimal Number: 331.6396073
EAN: 9780801891625
ASIN: 0801891620
Publication Date: January 27, 2010
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Product Description
This captivating book takes readers on an illustrated tour of the black railroad experience from slavery to Amtrak. With almost 200 images -- many never before published -- Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., examines the significant contributions of African Americans to the building, maintenance, operation, and profitability of the American railway system. The history of American railroads, Kornweibel makes clear, cannot be separated from African American history. For over a century, railroading provided the most important industrial occupation for blacks. Brakemen, firemen, porters, chefs, mechanics, laborers -- African American men and women have been essential to the daily operation and success of American railroads. The connections between railroads and African Americans extend well beyond employment. Civil rights protests beginning in the late 19th century challenged railroad segregation and job discrimination; the major waves of black migration to the North depended almost entirely on railroads; and railroad themes and imagery penetrated deep into black art, literature, drama, folklore, and music. Kornweibel's visual presentation of this rich history brings to life the hundreds of thousands of blacks who toiled for decades on America's great rail systems. Each chapter of text focuses on a different occupation or railroading experience, some peculiar to blacks. Together, the evocative images and the complementary essays supply a comprehensive and powerful survey of the social, cultural, political, and economic influence of African Americans on railroads and of railroads on the black community. Few today recall the importance of blacks to the American railroad industry, even though most black families have railroading ancestors. These stories of hardship and heroism, exploitation and endurance, anger and artistry illuminate a rich heritage and fascinating chapter in American history.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 26
 A Learning Experience August 28, 2010
annie (Mid-MI)
When I first received this book, I simply couldn't resist going through the entire book looking at all the photographs and reading about them. You can learn a lot by doing this, but don't stop there. This is an incredible book about African Americans and the railroads, unlike anything I have ever seen before. The author has gathered more than 200 rare photos and written a book that you won't be able to put down.
I have to admit that I knew very little about this subject. I am afraid our American History classes did not cover this subject very well when I was in school. While the stories and the photos will certainly educate you, they may also shock you. A photo showing some white travelers and a black porter is captioned, "Our Favorite Porter". Kornweibel writes that these photos reinforced whites' sense of social preeminence and their beliefs that blacks found gratification in serving them. I find this appalling. I would suggest that all high schools ought to have this book in their libraries. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Adding to our knowledge of the Age of Rail June 17, 2010
ck (Hawaii nei)
Theodore Kornweibel Jr. has spent almost 15 years researching and writing a book that is much more than the sum of its parts. As its name indicates, "Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey" most certainly contains a bounty of historical photos, many being published in a commercial work for the first time. However, this meticulously researched volume also traces the critical contributions black workers made to the development, maintenance, and operation of this nation's network of railroads.
This book details the expansion and evolution of American rail. Although Kornweibel provides specific data, this thick book is by no means a stodgy or difficult read. From the beginning, he sets a human tone, using stories such as that of Rosa the cook, whose life is interwoven for a time with the construction of the Charleston & Savannah Railroad. Photographs, carefully sourced and captioned, also keep the subject on track. Kornweibel follows the chronology of rail, with the expansion of routes before the Civil War, wartime damage and repair, and postwar modernization and further expansion. Throughout, he traces the interweaving of work, personal lives and culture. One chapter, for example, is devoted to railroad imagery in African American music, beginning with chants to accompany work, continuing with cultural homages to blues and spirituals, and looking at the impact on big band, swing, jazz, and rock.
Kornweibel has the academic chops for this work, as he is a professor emeritus in African American history. He also has breathed his share of railroad history, having spent decades as a volunteer, giving his time to such responsibilities as restoring and operating historic equipment. Indeed, Kornweibel says railroads have been a "lifelong fascination" for him. While he was studying for his doctorate, he says, he volunteered as a gandy dancer (track maintenance worker).
In "Railroads in the African American Experience," he pays close attention to railroad workers' role in early civil-rights activism, as well as the development and strengthening of the black middle class built in part on a stable economic foundation rail provided many families. Kornweibel is quite blunt about the long, strenuous, dangerous hours put in by many black railroad workers, he also shows the benefits of these careers, such as the speed and freedom of life on the rails; bonding; and travel benefits that enabled workers to visit far-flung family and friends or attend Negro League baseball games.
Based solely on its words and data, this book is of reference caliber. Factor in the images, however, and this book becomes an even more valuable resource and ongoing reference. You could buy this book for the photographs and print artifacts -- gathered here are historical images from the Library of Congress and railroad archives, as well as academic, museum and historical-society collections. The enduring strength of this work is its blend of approachability and authoritativeness.
 A weighty, scholarly and beautiful book June 7, 2010
Doug Weiskopf (Houston, Texas)
Korweibel is professor emeritus in African American History at San Diego State University, but more to the point of the value of this book, he is also an experienced, knowledgeable railfan who has been able to translate hundreds of primary sources and collected photographs and oral histories, as well as secondary writings, into a very readable, interesting story. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, known for their excellent works on technological history, this is a beautiful, interesting and often entertaining piece of weighty scholarship, full of never published historical photographs, as well as full-color reproductions of numerous pieces of art. Also entertaining are the humorous anecdotes of the tipping styles and personalities of various passengers ranging from the generous, like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, to the stingy, like Jack Benny. Ironically, an article that Kornweibel wrote for the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society's Railroad History on the use of slaves to build many early Southern railroads cost him the use of one major railroad's archives. His work was used as part of the background for a civil reparations lawsuit filed against several large corporations, including BNSF, CP, CSX, NS and UP, and Union Pacific took such umbrage at his audacity that they refused him all access to their archival collections. The book is arranged thematically, with chapters on blacks as construction and maintenance of way workers; firemen, brakemen and switchmen; porters and dining car crews; shop, freight house and office crews; postal workers; redcaps and other station workers; and even women working on the railroads, especially during WW I and WW II. All of this is presented against the background of constant struggles with racism, endemic discrimination and lower wages, and how the long and unpredictable hours of railroad work affected home, family and community life. Yet for many blacks railroad work was the first--and often the only--opportunity for a steady, respectable income source and way off the tenant farm. Also discussed are railroading images in African American art, literature and music.
For most modern railfans, railroad history has been color-blind, in that little thought was given to the fact that most of the workers seen, except the Pullman porters and dining car crews, looked like us and our fathers. As the author points out, the books and magazines we read growing up portrayed mostly whites in all the iconic roles we studied--engineer, conductor, brakeman, gandy dancer, station agent. As a Southerner, and student of Southern history, this reviewer knew that blacks helped to build Southern railroads, and took it for granted that was the case everywhere, but the author paints a very different picture. Blacks, both enslaved and free, and including a number of women, predominated in early construction and maintenance of way jobs in the South, but not in the North and West. Well up into the twentieth century they also served as brakemen, switchmen and firemen, and in many shop and roundhouse jobs, but always at lower pay and never with the opportunity to advance to engineer or conductor. Kornweibel tells this story well, emphasizing the human side in anecdotes of humor, hardship, tragedy and racism, and the quiet heroism with which men (and women) who just wanted to be able to keep working on the railroad met the many challenges.
A Wonderful Railroad Book with an Interesting Social Perspective May 20, 2010
Jeff Wignall (Stratford, CT USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is just a fascinating book and as I read through it I found myself saying, "I've always wondered about that!" time and time again. I grew up near the New Haven Line and so taking trains into New York's Grand Central Terminal was something I did from a very early age. As a small kid I always wondered a great deal about the men, most of them black, who worked both on the tracks and as conductors. I always had the feeling that they had some mystical knowledge of the railroads that I needed to know. And while there are lots of fascinating photos in this book that I've never seen before, the real depth of the book is the way it tells the story of the fascinating development of railroads (particularly in the south and midwest) in America. Interesting too is the connection between music/blues and arts in general and the railroads.
The most important aspect of this book though, I think, is the picture that it paints (or photographs!) of how the railroads, despite the hard work involved, created a kind of family/communal setting for African Americans trying to connect themselves, emotionally and financially, to the country that they worked so hard to create. I grew up in the 1950s/60s and a lot of the photos here bring me right back to my childhood--the kind men that greeted the faces of commuters every morning and the weary faces of the men laying and repairing the tracks along the way.
It's a fascinating book and, while it's a deeply interesting social story, it's also just a great story about an aspect of America that most of us were part of whether we knew it or not.
A Review by Samuel Augustus Jennings May 17, 2010
Samtrak (Washington DC)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
RAILROADS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.
Kornweibel thoroughly documents in painstaking-- and often tedious--detail the suffering and violence inflicted on African American - and female - railroad employees and passengers throughout the history of the United States. A most disturbing "experience". Chapter 1 illustrates how slave and convict labor were used to construct and maintain railroads.
"From Reconstruction into the early 1900s, southern courts purposely convicted large numbers of blacks - many for minor property crimes - and sentenced them to lengthy prison (not jail) terms to ensure railroads and railroad construction companies, as well as mine and plantation owners, could obtain cheap labor from the state." (p. 43)
*Prisoners rented
at the going rate
built the Texas & Pacific
cross the Lone Star State.
During the 19th century pre-Civil War era slaves were often leased from plantation owners to work on track gangs...without pay of course! (40)
*Black track gangs
fresh from the field
stitched together the land
with blood, sweat, and steel.
*Slinging and singing
in the sizzling heat
Gandy dancers never
missed a beat.
"That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang" (Sam Cooke)
*Muscles pumping!
Cheap labor force.
Black pioneers
laying the course.
*Connecting dots
a daily grind
on world's first
SOUL TRAIN line.
"In Georgia, 20 percent of black prisoners on railroad construction projects in 1870, who had been convicted of burglary, were serving life sentences." (43)
*The first railroad
color bar
forced blacks to ride
in baggage car.
"When Austrian civil engineer F. A. Ritter Von Gerstner traveled throughout the United States in 1838-40, at the end of the first decade of American railroading, he observed that in the South, free black passengers paid half fare and rode in a baggage car equipped with plain wooden benches, while others paid full fare and sat in coaches along with whites." (p. 237, chapter 10, Jim Crow Segregation)
Segregation on trains, busses, and stations in the north and the south was justified to protect white womanhood.
"To many whites, segregation was necessary for the protection of white female virtue. In the late nineteenth century, sexual relations did not have to end in intercourse or even physical contact to be considered intimate and dangerous to a woman's reputation and self-respect." (241)
Court cases, ICC regulations, presidential mandates, Supreme Court decisions --and civil disobedience by southern and northern rail and bus lines--are documented here. After The Supremes legitimized "Separate, but Equal" with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 "separate and unequal" persisted until that ruling was struck down by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (242) In 1892 Homer Plessy was arrested and jailed for refusing to leave a Louisiana railroad coach reserved for whites.
However in Morgan v. Virginia (1946) the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled that segregating interstate passengers was an "undue burden on interstate commerce". Indeed, as the author reveals, Irene Morgan was dragged kicking and screaming from a Greyhound bus in Virginia after she refused to sit in the back of the bus. (255)
"I remember riding in the designated "colored coach" - and being kicked out of lounge cars by surly conductors - on the WEST COAST CHAMPION (CW40) and ROYAL PALM (RP1) when I was a kid traveling between Florida and Detroit during the 50's, while having to give up my seat for whites on Greyhound and Orlando city busses!"
Dining Car Segregation
Black porters and dining car waiters were expected to enforce dining car segregation. [Until President Truman's 1948 mandate outlawing segregation in dining cars] blacks were either banned from the diner altogether or were forced to sit behind a curtain at the two tables closest to the steaming hot kitchen. (150, 262)
"Even after dining car segregation was outlawed, some southern railroads still ordered [white] stewards to avoid seating whites and blacks at the same tables." (152)
*I often stood in line
waiting to be greeted
while whites were
promptly seated.
It was either the back of the bus or the front of the train (behind the engine and baggage car or compartment) for hearty black passengers in the `good ole days'. The following observation by the author quite clearly describes my early love-hate relationship with the railroad. (265)
"Jim Crow's target was African Americans. They hated it. The depth of their bitterness is revealed in an ancient folk blues:
`Well, I'm goin' to buy me a little railroad of my own,
Ain't goin' to let nobody ride but de chocolate the bone.' "
Liza Augusta Jenkins Moorer published this powerful protest poem in 1907:
"If within the cruel Southland you have chance to take a ride,
You the Jim Crow cars have noticed, how they crush a Negro's pride,
How he pays a first class passage and a second class receives,
Gets the worst accommodations ev'ry friend of truth believes." (415)
In 1950 the U. S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of African Americans on dining cars of interstate railroads violated the Interstate Commerce Act and is illegal. [...]/2001/07/19/us/elmer-henderson-88-dies-father-... - Cached
Philip Elman, assistant to the Solicitor General, wrote a brief that tackled the legal and factual premises of segregation head on. [...]/2000/01/22/opinion/abroad-at-home-imposing-on... - Cached
''Segregation of Negroes, as practiced in this country, is universally understood as imposing on them a badge of inferiority.''
''The curtain which fences Negroes off from all other diners exposes - naked and unadorned - the caste system which segregation manifests and fosters. A Negro can obtain service only by accepting or appearing to accept, under the very eyes of his fellow passengers, white and colored, the caste system which the segregation signifies.''
''This message of humiliation comes, not as a single voice, but with all the reverberations of the entire pattern of segregation and discrimination of which it is a part.''
The brief said the court should reject it (the separate-but-equal rule) as ''a constitutional anachronism'' subjecting blacks to ''humiliation on the pretense that they are being treated as equals''.
*Discrimination
confined blacks
to the lowest jobs
on and off the tracks.
Low skills,
status, and pay
defined blacks (and women)
on the railway.
Black fireman
used to shovel coal
on steam locomotives
in days of old.
New diesels
took early toll
on jobs now too clean
for blacks to hold.
Kornweibel's book confirms that railway operating unions (conductors, engineers, and firemen) were the last labor unions in the U. S. to admit blacks (86-103), but he also exposes sexism within the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters led by the dynamic A. Philip Randolph ("Mr. Black Labor"). Although train maids could join the BSCP, they were expected to join the Ladies Auxiliary to "support" black male porters. (222, 353)
*The Ladies Auxiliary
helped the union survive
with fried chicken
to keep the dream alive.
"In addition to supporting BSCP, the Ladies Auxiliary advocated for better working conditions and civil rights for all blacks." (353) Laundry workers (mostly low-paid women) were also rejected when they asked Randolph to organize them during World War II. (228)
Community
Black railroad organizations played a major role "in uniting black communities" (347) through charity, recreation, sports, music, and activism (political, social, and civil rights). (336-357)
Despite discrimination and overt racism railroads offered black economic opportunities which enabled the "village" to survive and thrive.
*From humble beginnings
and a tortuous past
railroads created
the black middle class.
Black Railroad Inventions
"While blacks were not successful railroad entrepreneurs, a number of inventions made important contributions to railroad science and engineering, although securing a patent was no guarantee of financial reward." (453)
*Granville T. Woods
Telegraph a message
to a moving train?
Another Woods' invention
saving lives again.
(Patent 373,383)
World's greatest electrician?
Take a second look.
Betcha Woods' missing
from your history book.
*Andrew Jackson Beard
Coupling cars by hand
caused death and injury
til the "jenny coupler"
did it automatically.
*Elijah McCoy
Steam locomotives
kept getting up
with the "Real McCoy"
lubricating cup.
Gran Pappy Amos and
the girls and the boys
in the family known
as the Real McCoys.
As a long term student of black railroad history I figured, "It's all been said before...so what else is new?" Kornweibel has thankfully answered many questions that have lingered in my mind for many years. He has especially educated me on the historic role of women on the nation's railways (Chapter 9)...and filled me in on so more! For example, I was very surprised to learn that women - especially black women- had always performed "men's work" and were not just used as fillers during World War II.
RAILROADS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is worth a trip to your local independent book store. Okay, order from Amazon if you have to, but "Don't ask, Don't Tell!" Besides, Kornweibel's "photographic journey" is filled with rare vintage photos of blacks on tracks which speak "more than a thousand words".
This inspirational masterpiece is about survival...overcoming adversity... and the triumph of the human spirit. I often got so angry while reading this book I had to put it down and cool off before returning to atrocities fueled by institutionalized racism forever facing African Americans merely trying to realize the American dream guaranteed in the U S Constitution. And I thought I had it bad growing up in the segregated 50's! However, my ancestors' perseverance has made me even prouder to be an African American railroader.
Samuel Augustus Jennings
Amtrak Conductor
Northeast Corridor
(WAS-NYP)
*Excerpts from "Blacks on Tracks - Railroading thru Black History" (Samuel Augustus Jennings).
Showing reviews 1-5 of 26
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