Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey (review)

In Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey, Theodore Kornweibel Jr. has written a wide-ranging book that deals with the multifaceted relationship African Americans had with the railroads between 1829 and 1970. Outside of agricultural work, the railroad was one of the most popular occupations for African Americans in the early twentieth century (p. 42) and Kornweibel makes the case that, “[o]ver the long sweep of the Industrial Revolution, railroads provided more jobs for African Americans, and supported more black families and community institutions, than any other business” (p. 4). Yet historians have all but ignored the social and economic importance of the railroad for African Americans and only a few books address connections between African-American culture and the railroad. Kornweibel hopes “that this volume will unveil a rich heritage for blacks and a fascinating chapter in American (not just African American) history” (p. xii). When unveiling this heritage, Kornweibel hones in on the racial discrimination, double standards, and violence that were a daily part of the lives of black railroaders and emphasizes that the railroad represented both opportunity and oppression for African Americans.

In order to make African Americans part of the railroading story, Kornweibel redefines the meaning of the word “railroader” to include positions beyond the conductor and the engineer, beyond the jobs that were almost exclusively white. By focusing on firemen, woodpassers, brakemen, section-men, porters, and other occupations that lacked the prestige of the conductors and the engineers, he shows that African Americans were important historical actors. While the chapters that address the different kinds of work done by African-American laborers form the backbone of the book, Kornweibel intersperses chapters that deal with social issues such as female railroaders and black migration, and others that address cultural representations of the railroad in African-American art and music.

The decades of research that undergird the narrative show a clear commitment to this topic, not only to the facts and ideas unearthed and presented here, but also to the hope that this information might help to rectify past injustice. Indeed, Kornweibel’s previous research on railroad slavery has been used to make a case for reparations, particularly in situations where railroads today profit from the use of right of ways created by slave labor between 1829 and 1865 (p. 28). In order to find African Americans in the historical records, Kornweibel moved away from annual reports and newspaper articles that largely focused on white actors and instead combed through railroad employee magazines, obituaries, retirement notices, and legal documents that told stories about the relationships that African Americans and their families had with the railroad. Images depicting ways that African Americans interacted with technology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are hard to find. Kornweibel has located hundreds of these images and uses them to illustrate the roles that African Americans played in the construction and operation of the railroads, and the use of railroad imagery in the creation of African-American culture.

While Kornweibel explains that his book addresses the African-American experience of railroading, he indirectly addresses the operation of race as it relates to railroad technology and railroaders. For example, he shows that racial logic limited African Americans to working less prominent positions. An excellent discussion of Jim Crow explores how African Americans experienced racial double standards. A final chapter that discusses “Railroads and Racism” shows how the railroad industry, and the culture surrounding it, made racial stereotypes a tangible part of the lives of African Americans. This sort of analysis could have been expanded and the result would have been a book that addressed ways that the railroad technologies and racial categories co-created each other. An analysis of the connections between the railroad and the construction of race would be of great value; there is a desperate need for scholarship addressing the relationships between racial categories and technology.