Photographs by Dan Winters

Moving History By Bill Newcott, November & December 2009 They welcomed passengers onboard, served them meals, and tucked them in at night. For rail travelers, Pullman porters personified luxury. Few noticed that these men were on a journey of their own.

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The Sunset Limited. The Denver Zephyr. The Lark. Back in the day, these poetic train names whispered opportunity in the ears of tens of thousands of African American men. From 1868 through 1968—the golden era of American rail travel—they rode the rails as porters, serving in their distinctive uniforms aboard the lavishly appointed passenger sleeper cars built and operated by the Pullman Company.

Despite conditions that often cast them as second-class citizens, "the Pullman porters were the foundation of the black middle class," says Lyn Hughes, curator of the Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago. "The luxury of travel introduced them to bankers, lawyers, financiers-people they would ordinarily not have had contact with. They brought that experience with them back to their communities." In 1925 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first African American labor union to sign a collective bargaining agreement with a major U.S. company.

We recently met up with some surviving porters. They looked right at home with vintage trains-and pretty sharp in those uniforms, too. Above all, they stand out as beacons of enduring dignity.

Trained Investor: Samuel Coleman, 81

Before he and other African American waiters and cooks joined the Pullman porters' union in the 1960s, "we had to sleep after hours in the dining car," says Coleman, a dining-car waiter for 25 years. "In Oakland we slept in a shack next to the rail and ship yard." But he devoured copies of The Wall Street Journal that passengers left behind, and "Mr. Phillips from Phillips Petroleum spoke to me for hours about investments." Coleman helped himself by starting an investment club with a neighbor—he did well enough to retire from the railroad—and aided his fellow porters by spearheading unionization. "We were standing tall and walking tall to achieve the things we wanted for our families and the community."

"I worked the dining car on the Golden States from L.A. to Chicago and back, for 17 straight months," recalls Smith—that's more than a quarter-million miles by rail. A third-generation rail worker, he took a job with the Southern Pacific three days after his 18th birthday. "I started out as a 'fourth cook,' " he says, laughing. "That's a dishwasher." As for balancing trays on a swaying train, "you just roll with the punches. Pretty soon it's second nature." One of his best jobs was on the Lark, an overnight train between L.A. and San Francisco. "Nothing but movie stars and moguls," he says. World War II and the Army interrupted Smith's 12-year career—he was stationed on military trains along the West Coast. His GI Bill education enabled him to become a Los Angeles city civil engineer for 30 years. "But the best education I ever got," he says, "my million-dollar education, was on the train."

"As a child I used to live beside the track in Louisiana," says Gibson, who worked for Union Pacific for 38 years. "I'd wait for a train to go by, and signal the engineer to pull the whistle." Gibson's first train ride was in 1919, when his family moved from Louisiana to Texas. The Pullman opportunity came when he was a young married man in L.A. in the 1930s. "I'd receive and discharge passengers, take care of their baggage, and clean the coaches," he says. "I never bothered keeping track of the hours." As a porter, Gibson recalls, "we were treated decently. We were a special part of the people's travel experience."

"I never traveled until I got on the train," says Walker, who worked dining cars for 36 years out of Los Angeles and Chicago. "I liked mixing with people. Some were good. Some would call us names, but we were told not to let it get the best of us." As he tended to families, he worried about his own. "It was hard, being away," he says. Walker got four days off between longer trips, but once that train rolled out of the station, "the wife had to be all by herself. " He took care of Orson Welles and his family on one trip; Elizabeth Taylor and one of her husbands on another. "I don't remember his name," he says. "He was a young one." His favorite stop between Chicago and Los Angeles? "The Grand Canyon."