Thirty-three years ago, when E. Donald Hughes II was a bright, athletic young man just starting out in college, his father made a suggestion he considered an insult.
E. Donald Hughes Sr. was a Pullman porter, one of the thousands of African-American men since the Civil War who made their living serving the mostly white passengers on the sleeper cars attached to American trains.
"I know you're uppity, trying for a college degree and all that," the elder Hughes told him. "But you can make good money in tips. And believe me, a sleeping-car porter has to use his brain."
The younger Hughes didn't know much about his dad - the old man was often away on runs for weeks at a time, and they rarely spoke - but he did know that even in 1975, porters were still shining shoes, and the whole scene seemed a demeaning exercise from a bygone time.
Still, he needed a part-time job. He signed on for weekend runs on the Southern Railway, becoming part of a 100-year chapter in American history that soon would be no more.
On Monday, E. Donald Hughes II, 53, an Elkridge resident, celebrated that history. As part of its salute to Black History Month, Amtrak brought Hughes and two other former porters to Union Station in Washington, where they basked in the attention of more than 100 well-wishers at a formal ceremony.
As Hughes stood up to address the crowd, he sounded very much like a man whose perspective three decades ago had changed.
"I'm honored to be a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," he said as cameras clicked. "Railroads built this country, and the dedication of the humble sleeping-car porter made it possible. ... If you don't understand your own history, you'll never understand who you really are."
`Ph.D. in servitude'
Hughes' own lesson began, in a way, 91 years before he was born, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The act freed the slaves - and drew the notice of an American industrialist and inventor named George Mortimer Pullman.
A year earlier, Pullman had designed the first luxury overnight railroad car, a 60-foot-long contraption with carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs and other unheard-of amenities, not to mention fold-out beds. All he needed to complete his lucrative fleet of moving hotels was the sort of four-star service his well-heeled guests would expect.
