Last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing and photographing the two surviving members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Smith, 96, of Simi Valley, California (top photo), and Samuel Coleman, 93, of Las Vegas, Nevada (bottom photo).
While the two men had very different temperaments, they were both decidedly outgoing, happy people, grateful for the full lives they have lived. They both recalled the universal respect accorded them when they wore the Pullman waiter uniforms in their youth. Those starched white jackets, black ties and trousers left no doubt that these men demanded respect.
But both Smith and Coleman said their personal sense of dignity and self-worth had been instilled in them as children by their parents. The power of their Pullman uniforms, then, was as much a reflection of something deep within them as it was an external social validation. It’s not at all clear whether they could have achieved the latter had they not felt the former.
Neither seemed to have much sympathy for—or understanding of—post-Civil Rights-era grievance politics in which minorities are encouraged to define themselves by the barriers they face. In fact, for these gentlemen the secret to overcoming the aggressive racism they encountered was to never allow themselves to be defined by it. “We were always ducking and dodging whatever insults or slights came our way,” Smith said.
“A black man is always a threat in America,” said Coleman, whose father, a Mississippi sharecropper also named Sam Coleman, was lynched in 1929 when Sam, Jr., was 15-months old. “I was taught as a child to stand tall.” And throughout his life, that is what he did.
