![]() ![]() THEODORE KORNWEIBEL (Professor Emeritus, African-American History, San Diego State University): Good to be here.ĬAVANAUGH: Now we’d like to invite our audience to join the conversation. ![]() ![]() His book is called "Railroads in the African-American Experience: A Photographic Journey." And it’s a pleasure to welcome you, Ted, to These Days. He’s SDSU emeritus professor of African-American history. In a new book that’s lushly illustrated with many never before published photos, we learn about the extent of what railroads meant to black Americans, in terms of employment, culture, travel and civil rights. But the link between African-Americans and the growth of American railroads is much deeper than carrying luggage or preparing a sleeping car. The porter became a recognizable character in American art and music and, in the early days of Hollywood, black actors portraying train attendants and porters were one of the few imagines of African-Americans we ever saw in the movies. The face of the black Pullman porter was in railroad advertising for years. The image of the African-American railroad worker is a staple in the cultural history of America. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH (Host): I'm Maureen Cavanaugh, and you're listening to These Days on KPBS. Using many dozens of photos, many of which he purchased himself, the book begins with slavery and the birth of Southern Railroading and continues through Jim Crow and 20th century racism. WILSTON SAMUEL JACKSON – FIREMAN AND DRIVER OF THE MALLARD, ELIZABETHAN, AND FLYING SCOTSMAN AND THE FIRST BLACK TRAIN DRIVER IN GREAT BRITAIN.Ted Kornweibel is the author of "Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey," the first book to detail the entire sweep of the African-American experience with America's railroads. We will now be pressing for a National Heritage Blue Plaque as these are only eligible for the deceased.īill passed away at age 91 on 15 th September 2018. Sadly through illness he never got to see it. In acknowledgement of Bill’s achievement, a commentative blue plaque was exhibited in the offices at Kings Cross train station the year before his death. In 1966 Bill immigrated to Zambia, formerly Southern Rhodesia, where he continued to drive trains throughout that vast country, later becoming a farmer and helping his neighbours by arranging the erection of an iron bridge over a river. Years later, Bill saved another fireman’s life. If you do your job well, we’ll get along fine’. ![]() Bill replied, ‘I don’t have a problem with you, it is you who have a problem with me. The traumatised fireman returned to where Bill was preparing the engine and asked if he could work with him. The fireman then repeated his decision to the foreman, who, surprisingly, told the fireman to go home as he no longer had a job. What happened next would have crushed a lesser man, as while Bill was happily preparing the engine his allotted fireman told him he would not work with him. On Bill’s first day as a driver, he was congratulated by the white foreman on his achievement and told to prepare an engine to take out. His white colleagues were astonished and furious that Bill was now a driver and so they organised, forbidding any white man to work with Bill. He was overjoyed when in 1962 he passed his exams with flying colours to become a fully-fledged locomotive driver and The First Black Train Driver. For years, never late or missing a day, Bill endured a fireman’s punishing regime, shovelling 10 to 12 tons of coal a day in hot and filthy conditions. Even fellow Black railway workers believed a Black man could never become a driver, many quitting their rail jobs because of the lack of prospects. In those days there were no Black train drivers, an unspoken rule that the driver’s job was reserved for whites only. Regardless of the hostility, he determined to become a train driver. Arriving in London in 1952, Bill was shocked to be met with blatant racism, something he had never experienced in Jamaica. Bill decided to move to England, the Mother Land, where workers were needed to help rebuild after the devastation of the Second World War. Our late Father, Wilston Samuel Jackson, Bill to his friends, was born in the Jamaican parish of Portland in 1927.Īt age 17, his 45 year old father died suddenly, shattering Bill’s dreams of being a dentist. ![]()
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