"Pullman had this suddenly available pool of men who already had what amounted to a Ph.D. in servitude," says Larry Tye, author of Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. "They were looking for employment, he needed them, and he barely had to pay them a salary."
For the next century, as the Pullman Co. leased as many as 9,800 cars to the nation's railroads, the men who serviced them - shining shoes, cleaning spittoons, babysitting children - were virtually all black males, their jobs handed down generation to generation within families. At one point in the 1920s, more than 20,000 African-Americans worked for the railroads, with Pullman employing more blacks than any other company.
Porters' wages were low - they had to work 400 hours a month or 11,000 miles, whichever came first, to be paid at all - but with tips, they could earn more than the vast majority of American blacks. They enjoyed what amounted to a middle-class lifestyle and were seen in their communities as pillars of success, even rectitude.
Not so on the trains. Passengers and conductors regularly called porters "boy" or used racial epithets. Worse, all were addressed as "George," for George Pullman, harking back to an era in which slaves were referred to by the names of their masters. They could be sent out for weeks at a time or fired without redress.
"The conditions were abominable," says Hughes, who started studying the history of Pullman porters more than a decade after his own last run in 1978. "They had to be strong men - and many were very spiritual men - to endure such abuse."
In 1925, a group of porters contacted a labor organizer, a New York pamphleteer named A. Philip Randolph, to represent their interests. For 10 years, he fought the Pullman Co., the all-white American labor industry, and even fellow porters who feared losing their jobs. In 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America's first African-American labor union, won a collective bargaining agreement from mighty Pullman.
Randolph didn't stop there. Four years later, threatening a march on Washington, he pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to sign an executive order banning racial discrimination in the federal work force. Two decades after that, at 74, he put his contacts and organization to use again, spearheading the 1963 March on Washington, at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became a household name.
