Contributed by Doug Ferguson
Many years ago I wrote an account of a 1956 Christmas vacation train trip for the holidays from Cleveland, Ohio where I was a college student, to Wake Forest, North Carolina where my parents had moved the previous year. It was called “A Christmas Train Story” and is too long to present here.
The basis of the story went like this: A young sophomore college student (me!) had done his own travel arrangements for and was taking an extensive trip to Wake Forest, North Carolina all by himself for the first time in his life and thought he was a big deal for doing it! From my story:
“It was with great deal of self-satisfaction that I purchased my ticket, determined exactly on which track I was to board the train and then proceeded to descend to the train terminal beneath the Terminal Tower Building, then tallest landmark in the city of Cleveland, Ohio. After all, I was now a sophomore-engineering student at Case Institute of Technology and had taken care of myself for a year and one half now. I was a big deal!”
I then went on to describe the conditions at the time and the scene on board the train:
“After World War II and well through the '50's and beyond a great migration was occurring in America. Many poor African Americans and whites from the South were pouring into the large industrial cities in the North to find jobs in the booming postwar economy. While they worked and lived in these cities such as Cleveland, many were still closely tied to their families in the South and thus during Christmas holidays, the buses and trains were filled to capacity with a large interracial mix, especially the kind in the day coach which I was about to board.”
In the story, after describing the whole process of getting a too talkative seatmate and then the start of the long trip itself, I recalled noticing an attractive young women who got on the train at our Pittsburg stop that smiled at me and then sat down on an aisle seat behind me. When we stopped at another point further into Pennsylvania and got off to stretch our legs, she approached me for some small talk and I, being the young man full of himself as I have previously mentioned, thought she was coming on to me!
Then, as the whistle blew to re-board the train, she drummed up enough courage to get to the real reason she approached me. From the story:
“She said, “I know y’all will think this is awful, but as a college man I know you can help me. You see I was born and raised in the South and this has been awfully hard living up here in the North where y’all are so different.” I acknowledged to her how that might be while my mind wildly raced over what possible favor this beautiful young lady could want from me! She paused, and then as it was getting obvious we needed to reboard the train soon, she finally got to the huge favor she needed. “The only seat I could find when I got on the train, was next to a colored man and being a southern lady, I just can’t stand it!” she blurted. “Could y’all switch seats with me? I would really appreciate it.” I was dumbfounded! I didn’t know what to say so I said, “Sure. We had better get back on the train.” She said, “Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!” and we turned and hurried to reboard the day coach.”
The rest of the story was about the much needed deflation of my sophomoric ego, my pleasant short conversation with my new seatmate, a very courtly older black man in a neatly pressed suit and tie, who was going back to Washington, D.C. to spend Christmas with his daughter and finally, thoughts about my first early experience with ingrained racial prejudice.
As I look back at this experience today, especially at our current point in American history where there is so much negativity, I take away some different thoughts than I did when I wrote the story.
True, this young lady had been brought up with the old racial prejudices for which the South had been known. However, in the mid-1950’s she was a graduate Electrical Engineer from the University of Alabama and had taken an engineering job with Westinghouse in Pittsburg at a time when it was finally acceptable for women pursue professional jobs previously thought only appropriate for men. Later, according to my old roommate who became a professor there, subsequent generations of University of Alabama graduates were on the forefront of racial equality.
Secondly, reflecting now on the overall passenger scene on the train during those times, I also think about the freedom to move freely in America that provided the opportunity for thousands of southern post-WWII poor blacks and whites to migrate to jobs in the north and to become self-sufficient in spite of prejudices toward both groups that existed at the time. All of this was prior to the civil rights movement in the 60’s and 70’s that further cemented these kinds of freedoms.
During my lifetime, America, our homeland, was one of the few places in the world where all this positive change for disadvantaged men and women could happen peacefully and also be accepted by it’s citizens and leaders. We should never forget how lucky we were to live here then.
Doug Ferguson is a retired engineer living in Palmer, Alaska and has had a life-long interest in American history and human nature.