In September '39, my parents and I went from Franklin, New Hampshire, to our home in Manhattan. After seeing a Montreal - Boston express wizz by, we boarded a Boston and Maine local for Concord, NH. Before boarding our standard Pullman sleeper in the Concord Station, a covered station with a red-brick ornate building and a Concord Stagecoach in the lobby. we had time for supper and a movie. I don’t remember the movie, but the newsreels still are fixed in my mind, the German invasion of Poland. Bombers, bombardment, Germans marching through the streets of Warsaw, then the construction of the Ghetto walls, and a picture of tram train with the trailer having the large sign “Juden”. Both motor and trailer were cleristory/deck roof four-wheelers, the trailer probably an ex-horse car.
Three years (age ten) later I visited my sister and brother-in-law and their baby, my niece, in Richmond, arriving at the Main St. Station on a train handed over to the Seabord for Florida. I rode the Broad and Main streetcar to a connection with the Ginter Park line to then connect with the Northside bus to their home. Brother-in-law was an Army “flight surgeon” at the nearby Air Base, where I got my first airplane ride. Both the streetcar lines used blue and silver or blue and white double-truck Birneys (OK, maybe they were built by Bradley and not by Brill or a Brill subsidiary, but double-truck Birney describes the architectural design.). In New York City, the streetcar line I rode most often was Third Avenue’s Broadway Fortysecond St. line, the “B” line, and if the motorman did not have time when changing ends to fold the unused motorman’s seat against the interior a dash, I would always grab it to sit down for an observation car view if unoccupied when I got on. So, of course, I did the same on the Ginter Park line. Whereupon a well-dressed black woman (I would have used the word colored wom
This is interesting history. From my limited understanding in having spoken with people born in the 1910s and 1920s, desegregation in most of the public transport companies in New York City (which were still privately owned) occured long before the 60s. I’ve always wondered if this were true or just wishful memories. I was born in 63, so I didn’t experience the Jim Crow scenarios.
My late father told me that he traveled from New York City to Miami during the 50s (ACL Champion?) and enjoyed his trip with no segregation issues at all.
Note that it was a Richmond, VA streetcar where I first experienced segregation. There was none in NYC where I grew up in the 30’s. But note that I started using public transportation in NYC at age seven! I wonder how many parents on the threat would have kids using public transporation at age seven today?
If there ever was formal segregation in New York City or other northern towns, it was long gone by the 1920’s-30’s. In fact, given that most Southern segregation laws didn’t go on the books until the 1890’s, I doubt they ever existed. For example, both my parents went to high school in Minneapolis MN in the 1930’s, both their schools had a few black students.
There was informal or cultural segregation in cities like New York or Chicago, where blacks weren’t welcome in certain parts of town or certain restaurants or other establishments, but this was different from the Southern states where segregation was mandatory by statute (which didn’t end until the 1960’s in most cases).
The Rock Island’s “Twin Star Rocket” (connecting the Twin Cities with Dallas/Ft.Worth)in the 40’s-50’s for example was integrated in Minnesota and Iowa, but had to add a “Jim Crow” car in Missouri to run thru Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. (In some cases, a regular coach would have a divider that could be moved to allow whites in one part and blacks in another.)
I have one of Robert Wayner’s roster books and the equipment pool for the original all-coach “Southerner” on SR shows 54-seat partitioned coaches. I also have an August 1946 edition of the Official Guide" which shows CG’s “Man O’War” as having “seating for white passengers reserved”.
Age 7? Amazing, but understandable. We still had crime and corruption then, but from what I’ve been told by my elders…there was an “overall” higher level of respect among people that was far richer than today’s malevolent atmosphere.
I visited South Africa about five times in the middle 80’s, primarily on business. Alexander Hamilton III, who at one time was head of the NRHS and long-time member of the Boston Chapter (including the days when I was at MIT) was my seat companion on one trip, he traveling to railfan and I to earn money. Luckily, ALL the projects I worked on there were intergrated.
On my first visit, trolleybuses (double-deck) were still running in Johannasburg, but I was told I could not ride them because they were for blacks only. By the time of my last visit, not only were the buses gone, but the overhead wires as well.
Trains were segreated, actually mostly separate trains, but not the Blue Train, which was integrated (all private rooms). The internal fleights were integrated as well as the internaitonal. I did not meet any whites at the time that usefd any local transportation.
What suprises me most, in the US, is the Democrates ran the south before, and shortly after, the civil war. Yet the black minority (now close to the majority) still votes for them. It was the democrates that ran the Interstates directly through the up and coming black neighborhoods in northern America, and came up with welfare and ghetto housing, yet the blacks still vote for them… HHMMMM. makes you wonder, uh!
Wake up, and realize who went to war for the black slaves, and who died for their freedom. It wasn’t the Democrats, that’s for sure!
The first real ‘Jim Crow’ combine I saw was the one campaigned with the locomotive ‘General’ when it was on tour throught the Soth bu the L& N RR in the 1960’s. Back then, segregation was a fading fact of life in the South,but still fresh in the memory. It is kind of interesting that the Illinois Central’s City of New Orleans was well used by the Black community to travel from the South to the North for jobs, and travel back and forth for visits ‘home.’ It was the day train and was well used and well patronized, but was mixed between Blacks and Whites, but the preponderance of patrons were largely Back, whereas the Panama Limited was the night train, and was a premium Pulman service, was largely patronized by Whites, although there were always some colored passengers riding on it. The lions share of the crew was Black on both trains, but the Conductors were mostly White,although there were some Blacks as conductors, the Brakmen and rest of the Portersd and Waiters and Cooks were Black.
The Southern’s Tennesseean always seemed to have a pretty well mixed patronage coming into Memphis, towards the end [when I was able to ride it] it was all coach.
Well your “comment” has numerous factual errors in it.
<>1. Democrats controlled most if not all state governments in the South from the time of Andrew Jackson (1810’s-1820’s) well into the 1960’s and 1970’s, it didn’t end “shortly after the Civil War”.
The Interstate Highway Act was signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican; IIRC at the time the bill was passed by Congress, both houses were controlled by the Republicans - although even when the Democrats were in power, the real control was held by the “Conservative Coalition”, a mix of Republicans and Southern Democrats.
In any case, black migration had started years before that. It didn’t follow highways, it followed railroads. For example, blacks from Mississippi, Arkansas and west Tennessee tended to go to Chicago via the Illinois Central; blacks from Georgia and the Carolina’s took trains north to New York. (There was also a substantial white migration at the same time, Kentuckians moving to Detroit to work for Ford and GM for example.)
Until Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932, blacks were very strongly Republican - when they could vote. That’s why Democrats in the southern states did all they could to block blacks from voting: if all the blacks had voted Republican, they and the Republican white minori
When I was born in 1941, my sister needed some ongoing medical treatement that she could only get in downtown Chicago. Since my mother needed to stay with the newborn, by big sister went to town on the Chicago Aurora & Elgin all by herself, then walked to the doctor’s office somewhere in the Loop. She was eleven or twelve at the time. The only precaution was to make her memorize my father’s work telephone number – he worked for the phone company there.
I recently got to work on the archives of the Southern (now Norfolk Southern) Railway, and the cheif archivist, George Eichellberger, told me an interesting story about the construction of the Washington, D.C. Union Station.
There were six railroads funding the building of the new station (which was in the early 1900’s- somebody out there probably knows the exact date) and each railroad had veto authority over the design of the station. The final design was sent out to the railroads, and the Southern vetoed the design. The reason? The designers had not included restroom facilities for colored trainmen. Most folks don’t know that Jim Crow was also in Our Nation’s Capitol, so the original plans left no where for black railroad employees to wash up and relieve themselves.
The comment that was made with the veto stated that “our colored employees are as much members of the Southern family as our white employees.” They requested that the plans be altered to include facilities for employees who were people of color. That was done, and Washington Union Station was built.
When the Southern dieselized late in the 40’s and into the 50’s, the railroad unions kicked up a fuss over having a fireman on board. It did not matter that there was nothing for the fireman to do on board a diesel locomotive. The unions insisted on one. The President of the Southern solved the problem by bringing black employees back from retirement as “firemen”. Their specific job was to sit on the left hand side of the cab and do nothing. The unions backed down.