We got $62.50 a month. We had to depend a lot on tips. Some of the passengers would get hot about something. He wouldn’t give you nothing and run down and tell the other passengers not to give you anything. “Didn’t shine my shoes right… .” “Didn’t get my pillow.” They said it loud for other people to hear.
The porter instructor was a Negro man. The permanent inspector was a white man. They would have a mimeographed sheet. All he had to do was put a cross opposite any rule. The porter instructor would set there and watch you and write down when you turned your back. They turned in plenty on me because I was active in the Brotherhood. They were stool pigeons. They watched me my every move. They’d turn in what I said. A lot of men were scared off. But in spite of all that, we had a few here, there—kept the Brotherhood alive.
“The Brotherhood was born after several attempts by porters who were fired for it. The Company set up a Pullman Porter Benefit Association. Controlled by the Company. Three of the men were walkin’ down the street one day and heard Randolph speakin’ on a soap box.
48
These three porters heard him and said, ‘This is the man we need.’
“They didn’t have any salary to offer him. Randolph took the chance. We had a women’s auxiliary. They would have fish fries and raise some
money. He stuck it out for twelve long years without a salary. Never knew when he’d come back to a place, because he didn’t have the money to get there.”
When Pullman fought the Brotherhood, almost all the Negro papers sold out to the Company. I think the Pittsburgh
Courier
was an exception. And we carried these papers. They’d have big red headlines lambasting Randolph. They’d point out that the Pullman Company been good to the Negro: decent jobs, opening schools for children, all that kind of stuff. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
When I heard Randolph speak, it was like a light. Most eloquent man I ever heard. He done more to bring me in the fight for civil rights than anybody. Before that time, I figure that a Negro would be kicked around and accept whatever the white man did. I never knew the Negro had a right to enjoy freedom like everyone else. When Randolph stood there and talked that day, it made a different man out of me. From that day on, I was determined that I was gonna fight for freedom until I was able to get some of it myself. I was just stumblin’ here and there. But I been very successful in stumblin’ ever since that day. It was in 1928.
Shortly after, he became president of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. His was the first private home that was bombed. In the late Thirties, “I got a call about a sheriff who beat a woman to death. I got a telephone call about two o‘clock in the morning from a white man: ’I don’t like what happened. I can’t tell you on the phone. Come see me.’
“It was pouring rain. You might think I was crazy, but I drove forty miles out there. I walked on the front porch. Knocked on the door. Would I get a shotgun blast? I hear a man’s voice, ‘Is that you, Nixon?’ He opened the door and told me what had happened. But he wouldn’t sign anything. I don’t blame him. If he did, they would’ve done something to him.
“The grand jury met. Same man called and said, ‘You ought to have her sons there. They saw it.’ I got ahold of the dean at Miles College: ‘Put them boys on the train. I’ll get your money for you.’ I met the train. I said to the clerk, ‘I want these boys to testify before the grand jury.’ She almost fell dead. ‘The sheriff issues subpoenas,’ she said. ‘He’s the man who done the killin’.’
“I walked into his office. A short, fat fellow with hobnailed boots, two pistols, handcuffs, bullets around his belt, blackjack in back pants pocket, shirt all open. I said, ‘You Sheriff White?’ He said, ‘I’m Sheriff White.’ I said, ‘My name is E.D. Nixon. I represent the NAACP.’ You oughta seen him when I said that. ‘I’m here to ask you to subpoena these boys. They got a grand jury at three o’clock about the killin’ of their mother.’ He looked at me. He didn’t know what to say.
“He pulled out a pencil. He licked it. He took him so long to trace out the boys’ names. I said, ‘You know the state pays eight cents a mile for travel. Both these boys are entitled to transportation.’ He said, ‘It’s a hundred miles from here to Birmingham!’ I said, ‘That’s correct. And thirteen from Montgomery to where the case is, and three miles from the college to the station. So you got 116 miles.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
“He started figurin’ on a piece of paper. I could see he didn’t know what he was doin’. So I figured it out ahead of time. I wrote the figure and I said, ‘I believe when you get through figurin’ yours up, this’Il tally.‘ He grabbed my sheet and said, ’Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.’ He wrote a voucher. I got the money.
“Of course, he was acquitted. The woman died ‘from causes unknown.’ But he couldn’t believe his eyes. He just couldn’t believe a Negro had the courage to challenge him. I had nothing on me. If I had a pocket knife and had been arrested, that’s all they needed.”
I was in St. Louis when Randolph spoke that Sunday in ’28. He says, “If you stick with me, the day will soon come when you’ll be making $150 a month.” I couldn’t see a man raising my salary from $62.50. But I put a dollar in the collection anyway.
When I got home the next morning, the manager met me as I stepped off the train. “I understand you attended a meeting of the Brotherhood yesterday.” A stool pigeon had told him. I said, “That’s right.” He said, “If you continue to go, you won’t have no job.” Well, I won’t let nobody push me around. I said, “I
joined
the Brotherhood yesterday. I think I got enough money to carry any so-and-so to jail who messes with my job.” I never had any trouble after that.
In the course of my speaking, I got into hot water quite a bit. I took care of grievances. The southern white man couldn’t see why he had to abide by a contract that was agreed upon by the Company. Despite the fact that Randolph started the Brotherhood in 1925, they were not recognized as a bonafide union until 1938. During that time, a whole lot of us were gettin’ fired. Any time the Company felt you’d done
anything
—if you had anything to do with the Brotherhood, they got rid of you. Or punished you… .
I was once called in. The supervisor wrote me up, said I was talkin’ to “some woman.” The woman was my wife. I said, “Mr. Maloney, that woman is Mrs. Nixon. And I’m gonna demand you respect her as Mrs. Nixon, just as you would expect me to respect Mrs. Maloney as Mrs. Maloney. And I want my statement in the record.” It knocked him for a deck of tombstones.
They found me guilty of dereliction of duty. They gave me eight days on the ground. You get no pay for that time. The Chicago office of the
Company said eight days. The local man made it read: eighteen days. So I said to my wife, “They’re askin’ for a fight and they’re gonna get it.”
The Brotherhood appealed it to the Relations Board.
49
I was found not guilty, and the Pullman Company had to pay me for all the time lost. And that my record be clear of all charges.
We had a porter named Cooley. He was extremely large and weighed close to three hundred pounds. The Company wanted to get rid of him. The superintendent got on the train at Montgomery. He weighed three hundred and some odd pounds. Cooley gave him a pillow. He stretched out on the sofa and shut the door. When he got to Atlanta, he wrote a statement saying Porter Cooley failed to shut the toilets between Montgomery and Atlanta.
He told the conductor to write up Cooley as no good. The superintendent’s letter was May 31st. The conductor dated his letter June 6th. And the superintendent quoted the conductor in his letter.
At the hearing, I said he must be a fortune teller. He could read what the conductor wrote seven days before he wrote it. I wonder if he would read my hand. I’d like to have him tell my fortune if he’s that good.
What won the case, though, was weight and width. The superintendent stated that Porter Cooley didn’t lock the toilet doors from Montgomery to Atlanta. There were seventeen stops between. That means the superintendent would have to get out of that drawing room and walk to the other end of the car and back thirty-four times. He’d have to pass Cooley each time. If he weighed three hundred and some odd pounds and Cooley weighed close to three hundred, together they weighed close to six hundred pounds. You know the aisle of a Pullman car, it’s about thirty inches. It just wasn’t wide enough. He couldn’t pass him once, let alone thirty-four times. I pointed this out. We won the case.
Sure, there are fewer Pullman porters today. That’s because railroads are goin’ downhill. The plight is much of its own fault. No regard for passengers. What a railroad sells is service. When a man bought a ticket, it was service he bought along with transportation: cordial treatment, sanitation, ticket claims all that. They ran away a whole lot of passengers. I wanted to go to New Orleans last week. There was only one train, leaving at 11:50 at night. My God, there used to be a train out of here every three hours… .
POSTSCRIPT:
He was a key figure in the Montgomery bus boycott. Mrs. Rosa Parks, the lady who was arrested for refusing to move to the back of
the bus, was his secretary at the NAACP. It was he who issued the call to all the black preachers of the city. It was he who suggested the young pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The rest is history… .
Joe Morrison
Half his working life was spent in the coal mines of southwestern Indiana —“as poor a part of the country as we could afford.” He was born there. The remainder of his work days were in steel mills. He quit school at fourteen for his first job “in the fields.”
“My father was a farmer and a coal miner, ten kids and I’m the oldest. He wanted me to do something else. Every parent worried about their kids gettin’ killed in mine explosions. Just a few miles away, they had gas, where mines exploded and we had one in 1927, killed thirty-seven men.
“The coal industry was hit in ‘26 and never did fully recover. Coal and lumber, they was the two things hit pretty hard. There was a dip in 1919, it picked up some. But in ’26, there was another one. Coal and lumber never did recover.
“1929 is when it hit banking and big business. But we had suffering and starvation long before that. In the early Twenties, mines shut down, nothin’ for people to live on. Children fainted in school from hunger. Long before the stock market crash.”
ONCE I COUNTED the people that I give a lift to from Detroit to southern Indiana. It was fourteen people that I give a lift to that day. One was a woman with three children. Detroit was a one-industry town. When auto went down, everything went down. If there was a job in the auto plant, there’d be two hundred men for that job. (Laughs.)
In ‘30 and ’31, you’d see freight trains, you’d see hundreds of kids, young kids, lots of ‘em, just wandering all over the country. Looking for jobs, looking for excitement… . The one thing that was unique was to see women riding freight trains. That was unheard of, never had been thought of before. But it happened during the Depression. Women gettin’ places by ridin’ freight trains. Dressed in slacks or dressed like men, you could hardly tell ’em. Sometimes some man and his wife would get on, no money for fare.
You’d find political discussions going on in a boxcar. Ridin’ a hundred miles or so, guys were all strangers, maybe two or three knew each other,
pairs. There might be twenty men involved. They would discuss politics, what was happening. What should be done about this, that and so forth.
What was the spirit of the people
… ?
Oh, they was ready for revolution. A lot of businessmen expected it. The Government sent out monitors. They had ‘em in these Hoovervilles, outside the town, along the railroads, along the highways. In monitoring these places, they got a lot of information. The information was: revolution. People were talkin’ revolution all over the place. You met guys ridin’ the freight trains and so forth, talkin’ about what they’d like to do with a machine gun. How they’d like to tear loose on the rich… .
You don’t find much political talk any more among workingmen. You go to a tavern now, it’s around ball games, something like that. Seldom ever politics or war. The old crackerbarrel discussions we had at home, always lively.
Up until since the end of World War II, you always found a bunch of young workers, up and coming, that read a lot. They liked to discuss history and things like that. They read Socialist and Communist publications. Of course, the Communists didn’t come till a later period. The Socialist literature—I remember when I was seventeen down in the lead mines in Missouri—they’d get from them things, they could give a congressman a pretty good run for his money. Even in these small towns, they passed newspapers, magazines around. People that couldn’t subscribe, they’d ask everybody to save their papers, and they’d pass ’em on and so forth. People read and talked more than they do now.
Maybe they’re thinkin’ today, but they don’t talk. There’s an apathy. They’re so busy trying to keep their bills paid. And the unpopularity of their being interested in anything they’re confronted with. People forget a lot. The younger generation has simply forgotten the history of these periods. It’s being covered up.
The terror that’s placed upon people—the McCarthy times. The guys begin to clam up and say nothin’. I was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the Fifties. When I went back to the mill, it was only a couple of guys that acted afraid, afraid to talk to me the first day. After the first day, it was O.K.; they got over it. All the men went out of their way to be friendly, to aid me in any way they could. But none of ’em didn’t want to
talk
about it. We’ve reached a place where people just got over doing anything about things they didn’t want to face. They’re afraid of being branded, being called Red or something.