For Pullman Porter Museum founder, national park is fruition of 20 years work

As President Barack Obama weaved the gripping tale of the Pullman porters Thursday from a podium at Gwendolyn Brooks Preparatory Academy, Lyn Hughes, seated in a section near him, fought back tears.

This was the story the founder of Chicago’s A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum had devoted the last 20 years of her life to, and she was seeing some fruition of her work. Obama was in town to designate the Pullman Historical District a new national monument.

“What a birthday present for us!” a proud Hughes exclaimed Friday, as her museum prepared for an upcoming 20th anniversary celebration at its annual Black History Month fund-raising gala Feb. 28 at the Historic Parkway Ballroom.

“As the president was talking, I was having flashbacks of how this all started, when I took a tour of Pullman and found myself embarrassed and angry that I didn’t know the rich history right in my backyard,” she said. “I thought to myself, ‘He gets it.’ You have to get it to be able to communicate their story in such a moving way.”

Hughes’ museum, sited since 1995 at 104th & Maryland within the Pullman Historical District, holds one of the largest collections of photos, family artifacts and personal memorabilia of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first chartered African-American labor union.

Organized in 1925 by civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to take on America’s powerful Pullman Palace Car Company, the union is credited with spurring the Great Migration by distributing northern newspapers in the South, and becoming the springboard for an African-American middle class.

Randolph and his members battled long hours and scant pay for attendants on Pullman’s luxury sleeping cars for 12 years before achieving recognition Aug. 25, 1937. In the process, they helped open the door to the civil rights movement.

“It’s a story I’ve been telling for 20 years. It wasn’t until recent years when the National Park Service expressed an interest in the black labor history story, that everybody suddenly became a proponent of the Pullman porters. You would think the museum hadn’t been here,” Hughes asserted.

While the museum has fought for national park designation for several years, it wasn’t Hughes’ end goal. She’d vigorously sought to be included in the designation language — to the irritation of local politicians who got behind a bill supporting the national park effort.

The president’s executive action — superseding that legislation — doesn’t include the museum. But Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell, speaking before Obama on Thursday, called Hughes by name among people who helped the designation happen. And she did get a call from the White House offering her a moment with the president.

“I introduced myself, and he said, ‘I know who you are.’ And I asked about the museum being included in the language of his executive action. He said, ‘Now that’s where we’re going to get into trouble, because now you’re getting specific.’ I told him I was going to continue to explore that. He smiled and we took a picture, and that was that,” Hughes said.

“The Pullman porters are my passion. I’m not giving up.”

Last year saw the passing of two out of three of the remaining Pullman porters living in the Chicago area. Milton William Jones died at age 98 in February 2014, fellow porter Jesse C. Robinson died at age 104 in December.

The museum is set to announce a bold new partnership with DePaul University that will bolster its already unique database of 4,000 Pullman porters and their descendants. The two entities will launch a campaign to collect, compile and create an online depository of every Pullman porter and member of the on-board crew throughout history.

The current database, the result of an initial campaign in 2001, was catalogued in 2008 and included in a Hughes published book, “An Anthology of Respect: The Pullman Porters National Historic Registry of African-American Railroad Employees.” The new campaign will avail DePaul’s wealth of online resources and multimedia platforms, with the expanded database expected to be completed by June 2015.

For more information on the Feb. 28 event, visit www.aphiliprandolphmuseum.org/special-events.html