Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

Abstract

This book examines the experiences of black railroad workers from the late antebellum era through the modern civil rights movement. Eric Arnesen shows how blacks initially gained jobs as enslaved construction and maintenance workers and continued to work in the southern railroad industry through the Civil War years. With emancipation, southern railroad men stereotyped free black workers as unreliable but nonetheless hired growing numbers of black workers as wage laborers and prison workers under the notorious convict lease system. Although nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century blacks worked in such skilled jobs as fireman and brakeman, they nonetheless occupied the bottom rungs of the railroad labor force. Blacks continued to work in a variety of railroad jobs through the mid-twentieth century, but certain ideological, managerial, and technological changes ushered in the “service” worker or porter as the most popular image of the black railroad worker in the white mind. As railway companies established a chain of restaurants and later dining and sleeping cars, the porter stereotype symbolized the hardening of the color line in the railroad industry. Although the color line was by no means uniform across time or space, it endured until the onset of the modern civil rights movement. In careful detail, Arnesen demonstrates how the persistence of racial barriers in the railroad industry resulted from the interplay of the discriminatory policies of employers, rank-and-file white workers, racist unions, and the state. In addition to ongoing class and racial discrimination by employers, white workers waged a concerted campaign to subordinate the black worker. They organized petitions to management, initiated acts of mob violence, staged hate strikes, and secured hostile state legislation such as the “full crew” laws, which limited black employment in upper south, border, and northern states.