May 20 2009

Racism and Railroads–The US Experience and Israel’s

It’s difficult to track the crimes of the Israeli state and Zionism against the Palestinian people. I don’t mean hard to keep count of, true though that may be, but painful. It hurts to keep focusing on them, because they are so unrelenting–another olive grove bulldozed, another protester shot in the head with a tear gas canister, another bombing raid on Gaza, another house demolished.

Sometimes, though, a small outrage jumps out at me and I feel I have to do something, even if it’s just share my anger.

The trigger for this piece is a new policy initiated by Israel Railways. In March, 2009, management moved to lay off 150 Israeli Arabs who worked as guards, monitoring and maintaining railroad crossings. A new policy was put in place–only those with permits to carry weapons could hold the job.

And only veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces, in which few Arabs serve. get these permits. In fact, management stated explicitly that the program is designed to give employment to young veterans in Israel’s shaky economy. The workers have a case before the Labor Board there, but Israel Railways has already started hiring for their positions.

I realized immediately why I grew so angry. This is a direct parallel to what happened to Black railroad workers again and again in the years from the civil war to the victory of the modern civil rights movement.

The issue was the fireman’s job, the backbreaking and filthy job of shoveling coal into the engines of old steam locomotives. Think of Blind Willie McTell, “Statesboro Blues”:

Big Eighty left Savannah, Lord, and did not stop

You ought to saw that colored fireman when he got that boiler hot.

Or the old country tune “Wreck of the Old 97”:

So he turned and he said to his Black greasy fireman

“Shovel on a little more coal…”

But when the economy got real bad, suddenly the “Black man’s jobs” started looking pretty good to Southern whites. In 1911, for instance, 10 Black railroad workers were shot on the New Orleans & Texas Pacific line because the railroad gave them equal seniority with whites. Climbing on the locomotives to pull the spout down from the water tower and position it to refill the boiler, they were sitting ducks for snipers.

In the Great Depression of the ’30s, the same thing happened again. A deadly one-sided war took place, with the all-white unions of the Railroad Brotherhoods complicit in the terror when they weren’t actually organizing it. On the Mississippi division of the Illinois Central from 1932 to 1933, Frank Kincaid, Ed Cole, Aaron Williams, Wilburn Anderson, Frank Johnson and Will Harvey were shotgunned to death. Elsewhere, mob action by “concerned citizens” living along the railroad lines stopped trains and savaged Black firemen and the few white railroad workers who took their backs. The companies filled these sudden “vacancies” with white workers.

Israel’s crimes draw a lot of comparisons. We talk about the “apartheid wall.” David Rovics, in an essay reprinted at Fire on the Mountain, drew a very careful but pointed set of connections with the Nazi regime in Germany. Well, by me, these folks are today’s segregationists, white supremacists, KKK, and they should be understood and dealt with as such.

Reposted from Fire on the Mountain.

2 comments

  1. You’re the first person I’ve seen that has capitalized Black in that passage. I had never attached race to that particular use of the word black and I’m not sure why.

    Engineer Steve Broadey and two fireman were assigned to Southern Railway #1102 when they died in a wreck near Danville, Virginia on September 27, 1903.

    Previously, I had always assumed the black was coal dusted, not skin color. The word greasy I attributed also to the hazards of the job. But now that you mention it, I think you may be correct in your interpretation.

    Since I was curious, I did a little reading tonight on the history of the song and found this passage from The Tracks North, by Barbara A. Driscoll, p. 27-28:

    In the early days of southern railroads, and even during World War I, for example, African Americans constituted the majority of firemen. Their task was to shovel coal into the engines, or “stoke the engines”  a demanding, poorly paid job until mechanization eliminated most of the physical strain. World War I created more lucrative employment for African Americans outside the railroads, and McAdoo conceded equal pay to African American largely to keep them working for the railroads. Firemen’s pay thus was placed on a par with other railroad work, making the position desirable to white workers. Whites slowly eased African Americans out of firemen’s jobs into lesser-paid classifications until there were few African American firemen by World War II.

    Regardless of the skin color of the men killed in the wreck, the song evolved in the South and it is possible, maybe even probable, that local assumptions and biases about the railroad and firemen crept into the song’s reworking.

    In a paper by Alfred P. Scott, “The Origins of a Modern Traditional Ballad, ‘Wreck of the Old 97’” (pdf), the changes between the versions is interesting. Scott explains:

    The song was adopted by the mountain singers of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kentucky. In this environment of oral transmission, the song has begun to show signs of change by the folk process.

    The first version of the song, has this passage:

    Steve Brodie said to his faithful old fireman, Just throw in a little more coal.

    And when I blow for the Henry Street crossing. You just watch my drivers roll.

    A different version from a different writer, has the passage has been as:

    Steve Brooklyn said to his black greasy fireman,

    Just shovel on a little more coal,

    And when we cross the White Oak Mountain,

    You can watch old ninety-seven roll.

    Of which, Scott, comments:

    Lewey’s influence may have been present in the change of the engineer’s name to “Steve Brooklyn,” the speed of the train to ninety miles an hour, and phrasal changes such as “black greasy fireman” (actually, a white man) and “put her in Spencer.”

    So, Scott too interprets black to mean race rather than blacked, as by coal. In another subsequent version of the song, Scott writes, “The fireman is called a ‘black-faced fireman,’ a unique, though subtle variation.”

    All-in-all, I think its an interesting bit of history.

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