Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, by Larry Tye

History is not only about wars and revolutions, disasters and discoveries, the famous and the infamous. No, it’s also about the common people, working men and women, what they accomplished and how they strove to improve living conditions for themselves, their families and their communities. With that in mind, let’s help celebrate Black History Month by recalling an often-overlooked contribution to 20th century jazz by men who were neither performers, critics or promoters of the music. These men were the Pullman porters. For a hundred years, from the end of the Civil War until the late 1960s, the Pullman Company, which built sleeping cars for passenger railways, hired black porters to serve its overnight travelers. Those sleepy passengers were invariably well-heeled whites. In his book, Rising from the Rails, longtime Boston Globe reporter Larry Tye chronicles the history of this almost-forgotten profession, one that pioneered Negro labor unionizing and, as Tye’s subtitle maintains, helped forge a black middle class. Along the way, Tye argues that railroad porters played a crucial role in the spread of jazz across the continent in the 1920s and ’30s. First, he writes, it must be understood that blacks viewed porters much differently than whites did. “To whites who watched him on the train or film screen, [the porter] epitomized servility. To black neighbors