Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: STORIES OF BLACK PULLMAN PORTERS (Publications of the American Folklore Society) - Softcover

Santino, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252061942 ISBN 13: 9780252061943

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1991

Synopsis

As service workers in a luxurious sleeping-car train system, Pullman porters had both the highest status in the black community and the lowest rank on the train. They were trapped in the dual roles of charming host and obedient servant, and their constant smiles--even in the face of unreasonable demands by white passengers--were part of the job requirement.
 
Jack Santino's interviews with retired porters provide extensive firsthand accounts of their work, the job inequities they faced, the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the aborted Pullman porter strike of 1928. Through the testimony of ran-and-file workers as well as key figures such as E. D. Nixon, the porter who initiated the Montgomery bus boycott and helped launch the career of Martin Luther King, Jr. and C.L. Dellums, the only surviving founding member of the BSCP, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle illuminates the Pullman porters' struggle for dignity.
 
 

About this title

Review:

"This monograph, as moving and complex as the simple poetry of its eloquent title, will richly repay the attention of southern historians... [Santino's] analysis of Pullman porters is both richly descriptive and suggestive of the way in which the porters' world provides a microcosmic view of race relations that is also emblematic of the position of blacks in the larger world in which Pullman porters were part of the black elite." -- Jerrold Hirsch, Journal of Southern History

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0252061942
• ISBN 13: 9780252061943
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192