The Maryland House of Delegates voted Thursday to rename Baltimore-Washington International Airport after Thurgood Marshall, the Baltimore-born lawyer who became the first African-American Supreme Court justice when appointed to the court in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
While an entirely appropriate honor for Marshall - who died in 1993 - it's interesting to note that it was the sound of wheels on steel rails and the wail of locomotive whistles that coursed through his blood rather than airliners.
Marshall was born in 1908, the son of a Pullman waiter, and after his 1930 marriage and while a student at Howard University Law School, he worked on the railroad as a porter on a sleeping car, earning $50 a month.
In his book, Rising From The Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, Larry Tye, author and former Boston Globe reporter, chronicles the life of Pullman porters who for a century after the Civil War were perhaps the most ubiquitous yet enigmatic figures in daily American life.
The company Marshall worked for, the Pullman Co., is gone now, and the few former employees from that era are now in their 80s and beyond.
Tye observed that "religion and race can furnish identity and hope," and Pullman porters certainly reflected that.
"They are men whose compelling biographies tell bigger stories of racial dynamics, democracy, and the building of African-America. ... Behind almost every successful African-American, there is a Pullman porter," Tye writes.
The Pullman Co. was founded in 1867 by George M. Pullman to provide luxury sleeping and parlor-car service to the nation's railroads, and with the end of the Civil War and slavery, an army of blacks went to work for Pullman.
"He hired more Negroes than any businessman in America, giving them a monopoly on the profession of Pullman porter and a chance to enter the cherished middle class," Tye writes. "He did it not out of sentimentality, of which he had none, but because it made business sense. They came cheap, and men used to slave labor could be compelled to do whatever work they were asked, for as many hours as told."
Behind the porters' cheerfulness and welcoming countenance there was often pain. There were long hours and weeks away from home - porters worked an average of 300 to 400 hours a month while traveling about 11,000 miles. There was also physical abuse and intimidation. Porters labored under ironclad rules from which any variance meant instant dismissal. If a passenger complained about a porter, the porter lost his job.
