Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Still, the dance continued.

  A new technology rose, transporting the field of adventure from the sea back to the land, atop a lattice of parallel iron strips hammered into the earth. A multitude of trains began crisscrossing the land, as a multitude of ships had once traversed the sea. By 1865, thousands of miles of track had been laid in America, much of it by slave labor.

  By 1900, mechanical cotton-pickers prowled white fields, while men in white hoods prowled dark nights. But boats with white sails no longer prowled the seas. At seventeen years of age, my grandfather could neither read nor write. “This was not my fault or that of my parents,” he told Robert L. Duffus, then a reporter for the New York Times, in 1924. “I worked for $5 a month and my board and saved money to pay my way in school . . . so that I could learn to read and write.”10

  My grandfather left South Carolina with the Great Migration north. In New York City in 1908, after a three-month apprenticeship, he set forth on his journey as a Pullman porter, sailing across the country by rail to San Francisco and St. Louis and points in between. I believe Briton Hammon and all those Black Jacks who had gone before the mast would have well understood the travels and travails my grandfather faced, though they might have chafed at the sight of white smoke billowing from the stacks of locomotives rather than white sails billowing in the wind.

  Most of the memories I have of my grandfather come from pictures I’ve seen of him. And all the pictures I’ve seen show him dressed in a Pullman porter’s uniform. There’s an image of him with my father on his lap, my uncle and aunt as children to his right, and my grandmother sitting to his left. That picture, taken in the early 1920s, captured a moment in time when my grandfather held celebrity status for many Blacks and Whites, with reports of his activities being sent around the world by the news media.

  * * *

  What IBM was to my father, being a Pullman porter was to my grandfather. Many Whites called any Pullman porter George, a derisive name hearkening back to slavery when male slaves were simply called by the first name of their masters, now referring specifically to George Mortimer Pullman. From his headquarters in Chicago, Pullman first hired newly freed slaves en masse shortly after Emancipation to fulfill his dream of creating a luxury railroad experience for White Americans, whom he believed would feel most comfortable being attended to by subservient Blacks in uniform.11

  Along the track, as before the mast, a porter faced many challenges. Like Black sailors, they ran a gauntlet of racial insults and indignations from White passengers and White railway crew. They worked exceptionally long hours away from their families, for exceptionally low wages. Pullman expected them to get by on tips. For many years, my grandfather worked the Winsted Express, which ran between New York City and Winsted, Connecticut. Though it placed him closer to his home, he still served the commuting needs of wealthy Whites who traveled between Connecticut and New York City, as Duffus reported:

  Every night Ford sleeps on his car at Winsted. At 6:45 in the morning he starts for New York, where he arrives at 10:23. If he is lucky he gets home by 11:30. Four hours with his family and he leaves again, to take his car back to Winsted on the 4:25. Such is his life—a pretty useful one, according to those who have occasion to travel between New York and stations on the New Haven line.12

  Within the Black community, Pullman porters, like Black sailors before them, retained a vaunted position of admiration and respect. Many Pullman porters were highly educated, even if they were not highly respected by those for whom they worked and served. By some estimates, 30 percent of Black medical school graduates first served as Pullman porters.13 In 1924, my grandfather told the New York Times, “I was studying to be a minister, though I’m past that now. . . . I know a couple of doctors—brothers—who stayed ten years in the service [as Pullman porters] after they’d taken their degrees. They were saving money all the time. When they’d got enough they set up in practice.”14

  With Pullman porters, the informal news gathering begun by Black Jacks decades earlier became a formal relationship with Black newspapers throughout the country. As my grandfather told Collier’s Weekly in 1924, Pullman porters served as the news reporters of their day:

  I have carried many of the big men of this country. They are just like other people. Mr. John D. Rockefeller, senior, was just a nice old man. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan just a quiet gentleman. Former [New York State] Governor Whitman, the same. If some one hadn’t told me President Coolidge was in my car, I would never have known it.15

  Pullman porters had unfettered and unparalleled access to presidents, politicians, tycoons, sports stars, and celebrities, and prominent Black newspapers capitalized on the information this access provided. The Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and New York Age—several of the principal Black newspapers of the early twentieth century—built a robust business around Pullman porters who provided daily information and occasionally scoops, wrote columns, and even surreptitiously delivered newspapers by tossing them off their trains at designated pickup spots in Black communities.16

  Pullman porters symbolized the subservience that Black men needed to survive slavery and Jim Crow, and that White Americans desired, but they also represented a New Negro, to use a term popularized by Alain Locke, a writer and philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. Having fought and died to save democracy in World War I, Black American soldiers returned to a country that had not changed much with regard to race relations. Black Americans who bled on the battlefields of France were still lynched in the cotton fields of the South. Educational, political, economic, and social opportunities were still placed beyond their reach. So, in 1919, when White American mobs attacked Black communities in more than two dozen cities across the United States, Black Americans fought back.17

  A Pullman porter first broke the story of a White lynch mob attacking a Black community in North Platte, Nebraska, driving hundreds of Black men, women, and children from their homes. As a result of this early news, reported by the porter to a local branch of the NAACP, the organization contacted the governor, the mob’s advance was stopped, and the Black community was allowed to return safely home.18

  Famed Black poet and author Claude McKay, also a member of the Harlem Renaissance, captured the essence of this new militancy for social justice in his 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” in which he exhorted Blacks to “face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”19 McKay, a former Pullman porter, wrote his first book, Home to Harlem, during his breaks along the rails.20

  Pullman porters tapped A. Philip Randolph to lead them in forming the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), a union targeting higher wages and better working conditions for the men. Despite moles planted by the Pullman company at organizing meetings, in 1925 Randolph successfully formed the BSCP, the first predominantly Black labor union. Although the BSCP never enrolled a majority of Pullman porters as members and never received full recognition by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), it won its first labor contract with the Pullman company in 1937.

  The union served for many years as a training ground for future Black leaders. Randolph spearheaded the movement to desegregate the US military and organized the first March on Washington in 1941. E. D. Nixon, while still working as a Pullman porter, masterminded the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which vaulted Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to fame. Malcolm X, a Pullman dinner car waiter, wrote about his observations of race relationships between Pullman porters and customers on trains.21 Gordon Parks, the first Black photojournalist for Life magazine, found a magazine with Dust Bowl images of poor women and children while working as a Pullman porter, which spurred him on to a legendary career in photography and filmmaking.

  Count my grandfather John Baptist Ford also among the ranks of Pullman “firsts,” even though he was not a union man. In February 1924, my grandfather met Robert Malcolm Keir, PhD, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College’s famed Amos Tuck business school. Collier’s Weekly reported m
y grandfather’s account of what happened next:

  On one of my trips into New York a gentleman got talking to me, as many do. We talked about life and death, what they meant to us, and at New York he said he would see me again. When he did see me again I was his guest, through the courtesy of the Pullman management, at Dartmouth College. . . . I wasn’t nervous because I didn’t have anything to say but what I knew, and I thought what I might say might help someone else. I was made to feel among friends, although the students did fire a lot of questions at me.22

  Clearly impressed by this sophisticated Black porter who lacked a formal education, Keir invited my grandfather to give three lectures to his Economics 22 class at Dartmouth on March 25, 1924. His first lecture that day was so successful that his second pulled students and professors away from classes throughout the campus to fill a standing-room-only hall.

  “DARTMOUTH TO HEAR PARLOR CAR PORTER: John Baptist Ford, Negro, Will Give Lecture Tomorrow to Transportation Class,” a March 24, 1924, New York Times headline read. Two days later, the paper printed the story, “PULLMAN PORTER LECTURES: Ford Makes a Hit in an Address to Students at Dartmouth.” The Times continued to report on my grandfather in its April 13 issue of that year: “PULLMAN PORTER WINS AS COLLEGE LECTURER; John Baptist Ford, Who Made Four Hundred Dartmouth Students Look at His Profession with New Eyes, Talks of Traveling Public.”

  My grandfather was one of the few Black men to speak at Dartmouth since Booker T. Washington. In the spring and summer of 1924, reports of his lectures appeared in the pages of more than forty newspapers around the country—the New York Age, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Detroit Free Press, and the Portsmouth Herald, to name a few.

  “This Ford’s a Pullman Porter” read the title of a feature article on the cotton-picker-turned-college-lecturer in the July 5 issue of Collier’s Weekly. The article began by favorably comparing my grandfather to Henry Ford. In his many interviews, my grandfather never failed to mention his family, insisting that while he may have been invited to speak at a prestigious university, all of his children would be graduating from one.

  Although my grandfather met professors, bankers, moguls, and presidents in his railway car, I cannot say for sure if he ever met Thomas J. Watson. I strongly suspect that he did. Watson had a summer home in New Canaan, Connecticut, during the years when my grandfather worked as a Pullman porter on the Winsted Express. To get to New Canaan from New York City in those days, you either drove, a long and harrowing journey that wealthy men like Watson did not make, or you rode in a well-appointed train car on the Winsted Express—a far more appealing option for men like Watson. Stamford, Connecticut, would have been the stop at which Watson disembarked, to ride to New Canaan either by car or perhaps by train.

  According to a 1924 feature article in the Sunday New York Times, with the exception of Henry Ford, my grandfather “hauled” most of the famous millionaires of that age on his train; Watson was most likely among them.23

  My father was not wholly unaware of the tides of history that he rode into his first meeting with Thomas J. Watson. More than once, he spoke to me in hushed tones of his previous membership in the American Communist Party (ACP) in the late 1930s. He knew A. Philip Randolph, who was also involved in the ACP. Though my father never spoke of it, I can well imagine the conflicts that arose between him and his father, who disapproved of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which Randolph organized and led. I can imagine the political and rhetorical battles that took place inside the family home, when my grandfather returned from his job on the rails to confront my father returning from a meeting of the ACP.

  During the McCarthy hearings, afraid that any hint of a communist past might derail his career, my father gradually became vociferously anti-communist, pro-American, and one of the few Black Republicans at the time.

  If Pullman porters like my grandfather helped America stretch from sea to sea, then elevator operators like Tommy Barnes helped America stretch from sea to sky. Elevators allowed buildings to grow taller, and operators allowed elevators to convey passengers safely to these higher floors. Dressed in snazzy uniforms, like Pullman porters, elevator operators were witness to the interchange between presidents, politicians, tycoons, sports stars, and celebrities. And like porters, elevator operators were meant to be invisible—serving and subservient to the White passengers they transported.

  In 1917, before founding the BSCP, A. Philip Randolph formed a fledgling labor union of elevator operators. By the time my father was hired at IBM, tens of thousands of primarily Black operators worked elevators in buildings etching the New York City skyline.

  Enter the rise and fall of technology and race once again.

  Cars operating over interstate highways made suburbs, once accessible only by train, more convenient extensions of urban centers. Trains, once the preferred mode of transportation for the wealthy, gave way to airplanes or simply became commuter conveyances rather than luxurious palaces on rails served by elegantly uniformed porters. By the mid-1950s, the era of the Pullman porter was closing, as digital technology was similarly shutting down the era of the elevator operator. Passengers traveling upward could now control their journeys by pressing buttons, rather than relying on operators to pull levers and swing gates.

  Tomorrow’s technology eclipses today’s, which surpassed yesterday’s. And in this way technological progress is characterized by a smooth, steady, ever-upward march of science and innovation, unlike progress in race relations.

  Examples abound of the difference between progress in technology and race relations. Take the automobile. With each new model year, manufacturers add new features, enhance existing ones, or in some way improve aspects of a car’s performance or style. Contrast this with the history of African Americans: captured and sold into slavery (retrenchment), freed from slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation (renewal), and soon after subjected to draconian Jim Crow laws (retrenchment).

  Then there are smartphones. With each new model, processor speeds increase, screen quality is enhanced, memory capacity grows, and camera resolution is improved. But consider the ups and downs of voting rights for Blacks, once specifically written out of the US Constitution: during slavery, none; during Reconstruction (a brief period after Emancipation), an increase; with the advent of Jim Crow, a decrease; with the struggle leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an increase; with the nationwide attack on voting rights in the twenty-first century, a decrease.

  As described earlier in this chapter, the interaction between technology and race can be profound. Often it begins with the introduction of a new technology, which brings with it decreased progress in racial relations but also the seeds of a renewal of progress as marginalized people adopt and become proficient with the new technology. And then, when an even newer technology arises, the cycle begins again.

  7

  Honeypot Traps

  When I was ten, my father called me in from playing to sit me down at the kitchen table for the Big Talk. “Someday you’ll go to the bathroom and it will come out milky white instead of yellow,” he said. “Then you’ll be a man.”

  Without another word, he released me to resume playing. I guess he was satisfied with the CliffsNotes version of puberty. It didn’t matter. It was already too little, too late. By six, my parents had schooled me in the use of the library and the encyclopedia. Whenever I questioned anything, they said, “Just look it up.” By nine, I had a lot of questions about sex, and instead of asking them, I looked it up. By ten, my classmates looked to me as the go-to person on sex, especially when they also got the CliffsNotes version at home. By thirteen, I received the best sex education class a teenager could ever hope for, and that education happened, at all places, in church.

  After realizing that I’d probably never make a good Christian, and nor would she, my mother yanked my sister and me from Trinity Baptist Church and took us on a pilgrimage that my father saw as a certain road to hell. Each Sunday, we visited another alternative chu
rch in New York City: Unity, Religious Science, Ethical Culture. Afterward, my mother would debrief us, and generally we gave those churches a “thumbs-down.” That is, until we found Community Church on 35th Street and Park Avenue. One of the largest Unitarian-Universalist churches in the city, Community Church welcomed spiritual outcasts like my mother and her children.

  During the sixties, under the leadership of the Reverend Donald S. Harrington, Community Church was a hotbed of liberal thought and liberal action. Young people from the church went south to work in the burgeoning Black freedom struggle. Bar mitzvahs, bas mitzvahs, Shinto services, Buddhist services, Islamic services, Hindu services—in Sunday school, we studied one of the world’s great religions each month. But in New York City, we could also attend a worship service from these different religions and find a restaurant that served foods related to any of these faiths. For the first time in my life, I looked forward to Sundays, when I learned as much as I did in school during the week.

  My father, however, hated our newfound spirituality, which was so diametrically opposed to his own. Community Church helped young people develop their own definition of their religion. Our Sunday school class collectively determined that religion was not what we believed in, but how we lived our lives. And since sex was part of living, sex also became part of our religious education.