Rising from the Rails

An engaging social history that reveals the critical role Pullman porters played in the struggle for African American civil rights.

George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars just as the Civil War was ending, and the offer of a steady job and the chance to see the world proved irresistible. Scores of former slaves signed up to serve as maid and waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of well-heeled white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African Americans in the country by the early 1900s.

Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the world of the Pullman porter and the vital cultural, political, and economic roles he played as forerunner of the modern black middle class. Rising from the Rails is a riveting look at this missing chapter of American history.

Praise for Rising from the Rails

Named a Recommended Book by The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times

“A valuable window into a long-underreported dimension of African American history.” —Newsday

“A highly readable business history at one end and labor history at the other. . . . Tye shows what whites never saw—the grinding, often humiliating, realities of the job and the rippling effect of steady employment in the upward mobility of the porters’ children and grandchildren.” —Publishers Weekly