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Melissa Harris-Perry: [train horn] All aboard The Takeaway train. I'm your engineer Melissa Harris-Perry.

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It's time for another installment of our miniseries on how trains built America. Now, last week we heard about the vital role that railroads played in the country's early labor movements. If you haven't heard that one, be sure to go on back to our podcast feed and get up to speed.

Conductor: All aboard.

Bob Lettenberger: The idea of we can get out of our home, out of our neighborhood, out of our city, we're going to get onto this thing called the train, and we're going to see things we've never seen before, we're going to experience things we don't experience at home, it was special because there was that mystique, that aura, that went with it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's Bob Lettenberger, associate editor of Trains Magazine. He's describing a very American outlook in the early 20th century, that trains are engines of freedom. Part of why trains came to be seen this way is that certain industrialists began to focus on the comfort of travelers.

Bob Lettenberger: George Pullman perfected the idea of sleeping accommodations on rails. Now, one of the things that Pullman found key to his success was providing service like someone would receive in their Victorian era home or in a nice hotel of the time, and to provide that service on each Pullman sleeping car there was a Pullman porter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Pullman porters were an all Black male workforce meant to provide white passengers with highly responsive, personalized service throughout the trip. Black porters allowed white travelers to sit atop a mobile social hierarchy as they traveled across the country giving trains the mystique of luxury and freedom for some.

Manu Karuka: Railroads were tied to the legal structures, the legal apparatus of legal apartheid in the United States.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Manu Karuka of Barnard College. He helped us to complicate this story by explaining how train travel was a site of profound racial inequality throughout much of the 20th century.

Miriam Thaggert: You had the first class cars and then you had the Jim Crow car or the second class car. Those spaces were not as well kept. The seats might be harder. You may not have a restroom in those particular train cars. I'm Miriam Thaggert. I'm an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. I'm the author of Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad. For those African Americans who could afford it, they would try to buy a first class train ticket and ride in the first class car, but of course, as we know throughout history, those passengers were sometimes forced off because of their race.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Trains figure prominently in Black America's long struggle for racial justice.

Miriam Thaggert: Homer Plessy was a light-skinned African American in New Orleans and agreed to be part of this test case testing the segregation in Louisiana, rode in a white car, was arrested and his lawsuit eventually goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, Plessy v. Ferguson was a train case, and you'll remember that it's the case that gave us separate, but equal, that sanctioned from the highest court in the land, racial segregation. Homer Plessy wasn't the first to use trains to challenge Jim and Jane Crow laws. Even earlier lawsuits were spearheaded by Black women like Ida B. Wells, the trailblazing journalist who exposed the widespread practice of racist lynchings to the world.

Miriam Thaggert: In the 1880s, Ida B. Wells was traveling to get to her position as a teacher. She purchased a first class ticket to ride on a train car and ride in what was called a ladies' space. The conductor asked her to leave the first class space. She refused, and eventually the conductor tried to force her off physically with the help of some of the other passengers. Ida B. Wells was eventually forced off to the applause of some of the white passengers and she sued. She won in the lower courts. Unfortunately, the decision was overturned at the State Supreme Court of Tennessee.

What's interesting about some of the Black women who sued to ride in ladies' cars, a number of these lawsuits took place before Plessy v. Ferguson. One was Sally Robinson, also an African American woman who was traveling with her nephew who was very light-skinned, and the conductor assumed that Sally Robinson was a Black woman traveling with a white man, and the conductor states in the court record anytime he sees a Black woman traveling with a white man, it's for illicit purposes.

What's interesting about those cases is that one of the reasons why the Black women were ejected out of the car was because the conductor made assumptions about the Black women's chastity claiming that they were prostitutes. In fact, Sally Robinson's case was part of the well-known civil rights cases of 1883, which nullified an early Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's something about that language of the ladies' car, that despite her capacity to purchase a fare, to be able to afford a fare in the ladies' car, that it was somehow an affront to even imagine a Black woman as a lady.

Miriam Thaggert: Exactly. I think the term ladies' car or ladies' space was really important for African American women because for so often African American women have been denied that particular term. We see a number of Black women initiating lawsuits in the 1880s arguing for that right to occupy this highly contested space. Ladies' spaces were primarily for white women traveling alone or with a male companion or relative. The fact that Black women would try to ride in those cars, I think, caused a lot of animosity for a number of white male and female passengers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Who's Jane Crow?

Miriam Thaggert: Jane Crow is a term, a phrase coined by Pauli Murray, a lawyer, scholar, priest, extraordinary individual. Pauli Murray came up with the term to help describe the discrimination based upon sex and gender. They use the particular term Jane Crow to highlight the discrimination that women of color experienced.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about also Black women workers on the train. We had a previous conversation about the Pullman porters. Who were the Pullman maids?

Miriam Thaggert: The Pullman maids, I think, are one of the more overlooked positions within the Pullman Company. Keep in mind, the Pullman Company was at one point one of the largest employers of African Americans in the 19th and early 20th century. Pullman maids were African American women who were hired to service white female passengers, the elderly and children. There were always more porters than maids, which is one reason, I think, why they're not as widely known as the Pullman porters.

They had to follow certain rules of protocol. The Pullman Company has a pamphlet of 17 different rules that they were expected to follow. Whereas the Pullman porters were able to earn tips by shining shoes and performing other tasks, the Pullman maids earned tips by offering manicures and styling hair. I think their experiences within the Pullman compartment were quite fraught. They were usually the only Black female employee within the Pullman compartment, which I see as both a public and a private space.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering what kinds of circumstances and conditions Pullman maids had to navigate.

Miriam Thaggert: A number of Pullman maids as well as porters were accused of theft. If any items went missing during a train trip, that would be recorded on their employee card. They weren't allowed to wear makeup. They had a certain uniform that they were expected to wear. There is one letter at the Chicago History Museum written by a Pullman maid. It's an anonymous letter in which she talks about being harassed by a train conductor, and a train conductor who wants to force her off the train as it goes from Florida up the East Coast. There are moments in which we see some of the difficulties and the complexities of working as a Black woman in this public private space.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Did Black women at any point see and experience the train as a space of freedom?

Miriam Thaggert: I think we see that a lot in some of the blues songs. If we look at Clara Smith, she has this wonderful song called Traveling Blues, which I think highlights some of the elements of freedom that we traditionally associate with, say, white men or even black men on the railroad. I mentioned Pauli Murray earlier, and Pauli Murray was a person who identified privately as male. In their scrapbooks we see Murray climbing freight trains and I think experiencing some of that pleasure that has been traditionally associated with train travel in the United States. I think there are moments of black female pleasure in train riding. You just have to look in the margins, so to speak, to find it, off the tracks.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me a bit about the role of trains in the Great Migration.

Miriam Thaggert: Trains were really important in the Great Migration, which was this mass movement of African Americans from the south to parts of the north and the west. One of the train companies that I think was pivotal to this migration was the Illinois Central, which traveled between New Orleans and Chicago. There's also a really great series of art by Romare Bearden, art panels depicting the role of the train in the Great Migration. The Pullman porters were also important in helping to spread information about where to go if people were to go to the north. They also disseminated African American newspapers when they would return home.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why do you think so many Americans continue to have a bit of a lingering romanticism with trains even in the present day?

Miriam Thaggert: I think trains are so important to American cultural history. I think our history as Americans is very much tied to mobility, and trains are a great symbol of that sort of mobility that suggests the ingenuity or progress of the American nation. But one thing I hope people consider, is how do certain groups who have been overlooked in these discussions of these large-scale national narratives like progress.

How do some groups like African American women experience that particular form of technology? Do they have the same sense of pleasure? Do they experience the same sense of progress that we normally tell ourselves about Americans in the American nation? I think once different groups are centered, are become the subject of discussion, we can complicate those familiar stories we like to tell ourselves about Americans and mobility and progress.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Miriam Thaggert is associate professor of English at the University of Buffalo, and author of Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad. Thank you for your time.

Miriam Thaggert: Thank you for having me.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Stick with us. The Takeaway train is chugging along up to the present day right after this. Welcome back aboard The Takeaway Train. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we've been hearing stories that complicate the American ideal of trains as engines of freedom, particularly for black folk. This complicated relationship continued into the middle part of the 20th century when Americans' romance with trains began to go off the rails.

Jared Johnson: Once upon a time, cars were extremely expensive and it was quite difficult to travel from one part of town to the other, let alone across the country. Trains were the primary way to get around. I am Jared Johnson, the Executive Director of Transit Matters. After World War II and the Federal Interstate Act that really transformed our country, but also transformed our cities. It meant that so much of the attention, so much of the money turned to highways.

Then you have a lot of train systems shutting down or being replaced by bus systems. Then in the '60s and '70s, once cities really hollowed out, that's really when you start to see public transportation just really take a nose dive all across the country because it, all of the wealthier mostly white, business communities that have previously used those buses and trains we're all driving cars and were out in the suburbs. You had left only the lowest income folks and disproportionately black and brown folks. That's still the case in many, many cities today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: But just as some communities once fought the railroads, those that now relied on trains started to revolt against the highways, including in Jared's home base of Boston, Massachusetts.

Jared Johnson: The highway revolts really refers to this period around the '50s, '60s, and even into the '70s, where in response to cities across the country, taking advantage of the very generous highway funds from the government looked to add highways directly connecting the suburbs to their downtowns. But the way that they often did that, and in many cases very intentionally, was through black and brown communities. In fact, there was an often, said the statement, white man's roads through black man's homes. The freeway revolts were organized, fights organized protests against these highways coming through these communities. There were many cases where they were not successful.

There were some cases where they at least got them to bury the highway or put it through a tunnel. But there were a number of instances where communities were successful and where they got the cities to stop the highway projects. In fact, there's a number of places where you can see dead-end ramps or interchanges, and where there's a ramp that looks like it's floating in the air or roads to nowhere. A lot of that is the legacy of that pushback. Boston is the core and center to the story of the highway revolts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm a southerner. How is it the story of Boston is the story of America's relationship with passenger trains?

Jared Johnson: As cities across the country were turning to suburbanization and their downtowns were hollowing out, Boston was no different. The powers that be in the city were looking at a new highway that was going to go straight through, as it often did in most US cities straight through Boston's black and brown neighborhoods. It was a huge fight. It lasted about the better part of two decades. But ultimately they were able to be successful and they were able to get the governor to have a moratorium on building new highways that still exists today. They were able to get the successive governor to actually change the federal law so that Massachusetts could use federal highway funds to build transit.

Then they were able to actually turn the highway right of way that had already been cleared, into a brand new transit facility that is pretty, pretty amazing. It was for the time, very modern and included basketball courts and a whole running facility. But unfortunately, there was the other side of that, which is that this facility, when it opened, it replaced the train line that went right through the core, right through the heart of Boston's black community, through Roxbury, and through Jamaica Plain. Those folks have still not been able to get a transit service that is as good as the one that came before it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me more about then how this question of transit train infrastructure then shapes a person's interactions with their city and with their environment.

Jared Johnson: First you had the residents move out to the suburbs and cities try to sort of stay competitive by driving highways through their city, again, often through black and brown communities to try to keep the downtown competitive. But over time people wanted to be closer to where their homes were. The businesses often moved out to the suburbs. This is when you get the office parks and the edge cities that pop up in the late '70s, '80s, and '90s.

You have these transit systems that are primarily meant to get people downtown. Then in some places, Detroit was a poster child for this up until, really until this year, the suburban counties or the suburban jurisdictions made sure that the bus service from the city stopped at the city line in order to make it very difficult for those coming from the city to be able to access the jobs, the neighborhoods, residential things out there.

You really, and a lot of this really persists today. There's a great Harvard study that looks at how transportation is really the lynchpin. It's one of the single biggest determinants of someone's future success in life. Even more so than zip codes, other things that is access to high-quality transportation because it, it can connect you to so many things, even if they're not in your neighborhood.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It feels like now there are some cities that are beginning to reinvest in their public transit, particularly in transit trains. Can you say more about that?

Jared Johnson: Absolutely. In Boston, the continuation of that story is that the highway that went through the middle of downtown and cut off access from the downtown core to the waterfront was in pretty abysmal shape by the late '80s and '90s. Well over capacity, falling apart. Enter the big dig, the infamous, infamous project that is still known as one of, if not the most expensive, single construction project when it comes to the interstate highway.

The little-known fact of that is that a lot of environmental groups namely the Conservation Law Foundation, sued the state to make sure that there were public transportation projects included in that as mitigation because they said look, we know that this project is going to help with congestion and is going to alleviate some of the safety concerns, but it's also going to increase the amount of people driving and increased emissions. They fought and were able to win that case.

One of the projects that came out of that was the Green Line extension, an extension of our light rail network. It was arguably the first major extension in 50 or 60 years, unfortunately, because of political machinations, various lawsuits, the state dragging their feet. The project opened in stages this year, about 30 years after it was first proposed, which because of a number of other factors in that Summerville, the community that is the primary beneficiary, that community has really changed. There are still definitely some pockets of low-income folks, but a lot of the folks who were meant to benefit from that project have been pushed out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about the ways that there is still a residual sense that participating in investing in infrastructure, in trains, in collective transit somehow represents something less desirable than building the highways and roads.

Jared Johnson: Maryland is a great example of that. The previous governor often held up as a common sense moderator who can reach across the aisle, he canceled a project that had long been in fruition that would've served the west side of Baltimore, Black community that has been a transit desert for some time. That project was getting very close to the finish line, and he rejected that project and turned away hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for that project.

He did end up moving forward another Black rail project. Not that the two should be in competition, but it was a project that primarily served a wealthier area and coincidentally served housing divisions that his family had an interest in. There's absolutely a sense of, not only public transportation being seen as secondary to highways and roads, but also it's supposed to be a tool to raise land values and not so much in really getting to the brass tacks and serving communities that are transit deserts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you ever think of trains as engines of freedom?

Jared Johnson: Yes. I do, actually. I do. I think going back to that study about access to opportunity, that that's really what trains are about, and not just jobs, which is hugely important, but access to cultural events, access to see friends and family. As we get older, having the ability to go and visit friends and family regardless of your ability to drive because [unintelligible 00:22:21] is really huge. I also think about young people.

I was at a talk earlier this month and there was a high school student that talked about her experience of going to take the train with her friends all around Boston and reflecting that if they lived in the suburbs, this would be much more difficult or impossible. It gives young people freedom. It also gives their caretakers freedom to not have to shuttle them around. I really think about how from 8 to 80 transit can really provide a huge level of freedom.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jared Johnson is Executive Director of Transit Matters, a public transit advocacy organization in Boston. Jared, thanks so much.

Jared Johnson: Of course, thanks for having me on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, folks, be sure to tune in Friday for the final leg of our journey on America's railroads. If you missed the first stop, check out our podcast to hear how trains shaped America's labor movement.

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