Jim Crow Cars
By Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Africana Studies
San Diego State University
and
Superintendent of Restoration
San Diego Railroad Museu

This article appeared in expanded form in the National Railway Bulletin, vol. 62, no. 4, 1997, pp. 4-21, and is reprinted with permission.

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Diagram of the Western Railway of Alabama Diner 500. Note the word “curtain” in the middle of the car, signifying the area (closest to the kitchen) in which black patrons were allowed to sit. Credit: Old Alabama Rails Collection

Black travelers had to endure the humiliations of segregation on American railroads from the 1830s until the 1960s. But the use of Jim Crow cars has been infrequently acknowledged in railroad literature, probably because it is such an embarrassing topic. A case in point is one of the most famous photographs of American railroading, the "triple crossing" in Richmond, Virginia. As often as I have seen this photograph in the last four decades, I don’t remember reading a caption noting that the Chesapeake & Ohio local (on the top level) had a Jim Crow car. For both historians and train buffs alike, such information has been better left unsaid. I disagree. It’s part of African American history, as well as railroad history.

There remains a unique opportunity to tell this history: Twenty-nine Jim Crow cars survive today, five from the nineteenth century. If railroad museums are willing to honestly identify and interpret them, these cars will help fill a significant lacuna in the story of American railroading.

Segregation of black passengers quickly appeared in the 1830s, the first decade of American railroads. John H. White, Jr., the modern authority on American passenger cars, notes that as early as 1840, some southern railroads required blacks to ride in baggage cars, with no seating provided. Other southern trains, however, "contained half-fare compartments [with bench seats] in the baggage car" for blacks. And on still other early southern railroads, free black travelers could ride in coaches alongside whites if they paid a full fare. But after about 1850 all blacks were probably consigned to baggage cars or segregated combines in the South, with the exception of slaves in attendance on their owners. In the North throughout the ante-bellum period, railroads often refused to allow blacks in coaches, leaving them no option but to ride in baggage cars. In both regions of the country, baggage cars were also the resort of white men who wanted to smoke, drink, or gamble, so black passengers had to endure both an uncomfortable and an unwholesome environment when traveling by rail.

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Atlanta & West Point RR Diner 402, built at the Montgomery Shops, also showing a curtain divider. Credit: Old Alabama Rails Collection

The antebellum passenger car innovation which became the most typical Jim Crow accommodation was the combination car, or combine. It contained a baggage and/or mail section, with the rest of the car occupied by passengers. According to White, combines were first built either to provide a space for male smokers, or to segregate blacks from white passengers. In either case, combines were in use on several southern railroads by 1840. After the Civil War, combines were widely used for the next 90 years on routes which did not have enough parcel or passenger business to warrant a separate baggage car and separate coaches for passengers of each race. On many southern short lines, the combine had three compartments: one for baggage, one for black passengers, and one for white passengers. Major railroads, too, used combines on long-distance and local runs as well as on mixed trains.

Free blacks in the South were in no political position to oppose segregation prior to the Civil War, but those in the North, with the aid of abolitionists, began to challenge railroad Jim Crow as early as 1840. Employing lawsuits, boycotts, petitions, and lobbying, they gained the elimination of segregation soon after the Civil War. Not so in the South. Several southern states adopted railroad segregation ordinances in the months right after the war’s end. But then, during Radical Reconstruction, when blacks enjoyed a brief period of political influence, most of the states guaranteed equal access to public transportation. On the national level, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which assured blacks of "full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations" on railroads. But law didn’t guarantee compliance; railroad companies ignored state statutes and the federal act with impunity in barring blacks from first class accommodations, although segregation was not yet widely imposed on those paying second-class coach fares.

The march to Jim Crow after Reconstruction was hastened by the United States Supreme Court, which soon emasculated the Civil Rights Act, ruling that while states could not impose segregation, private individuals (including corporations) were free to do so. Then the newly established Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that segregation was only prejudicial if the accommodations for each race were unequal. Finally, the Supreme Court gave full approval to Jim Crow in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896). The Court concluded that the Constitution did not guarantee blacks "social equality" with whites. All that was required was that separate railroad accommodations be equal. This proved to be a legal fiction. For most of the next fifty years accommodations were rarely equal to those for whites. The same inequality also prevailed in station facilities: separate black and white waiting rooms became common, which usually included separate ticket windows. And where toilets and restaurants were provided, they, too, were segregated.