Reviews for Shaping Southern society

The average rating for Shaping Southern society based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-31 00:00:00 Michael Entler My great-grandfather, who died long before I was born, was a Pullman Porter. I was so happy to find a book dedicated to the lives of these upstanding men, many of whom were the first to leave the farms in the South and went on to help create the black middle class. Five stars!

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-29 00:00:00 Raul Gudino This book discusses the Pullman porters and how they became the Black middle class. They were more travelled than ordinary black folk of that era and also came into contact with a much wider diversity of people – particularly if you compare them to share-croppers in the Deep South. They instilled a work ethic in their families; sons could inherit the positions of their fathers. There was a price to this as the author points out. The Pullman porters hid behind a mask – smiling and shining shoes for their white clientele. They were often called “George” – or much worse. But they could become couriers of news for the black community – picking up books and newspapers from across the country and over-hearing the conversations of their customers. They were only able to form a union in the 1930’s when the Roosevelt administration passed laws over-ruling company unions. There was a certain redundancy in this book and some themes are repeated too often. The biographical descriptions of George Pullman and A. Philip Randolph are interesting. The son of Abraham Lincoln – Todd, certainly did not follow in his father’s footsteps by exploiting the Pullman porters.