At some point during Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1944 train trip from Atlanta to Simsbury, Conn., the hungry, rambunctious teenager left the company of his fellow Morehouse students and went to the state-of-the-art dining car to enjoy Southern Railway’s fine dining on wheels. He had no idea what was awaiting him.
The tagline of the Southern Railway Company was “Southern serves the South.” The company motto referred to more than just geography, but also the “Southern way of life.” The Crescent offered the first dining cars on trains departing Atlanta beginning in the nineteenth century. And the company had no plans to change its nineteenth-century segregationist roots. The observation and dining cars were designed to resemble a hotel tavern-lounge, inviting passengers to relax and enjoy complimentary coffee and orange juice, or alcoholic beverages for purchase. Usually, a crew of twelve workers handled the wood-fired kitchens and table service. They served traditional Southern cuisine and traditional Southern mores. African American men often labored in these environments— as servers or cooks—but African American passengers like ML were not welcome.
Access to these spaces was heavily policed. Black passengers could procure food on board but, as Du Bois summed up for readers in The New Republic, “it is difficult.” William Pickens, the NAACP director of branches and assistant field secretary, chronicled how difficult it was even to purchase decent food and beverages during an interstate Southern train excursion. He was “gruffly informed by the trainmen” there were “no sanitary drinking cups” offered in the Jim Crow car.
It is evident, the NAACP concluded, if you are a Negro, there are “practically” no accommodations made for dining on the train.
When the car made intermittent stops at train stations so passengers who were, as Pickens noted, “too stingy to pay the dining car prices and the tips” could get food, Black passengers discovered that station lunchrooms across the South only served white passengers. “As if fate had conspired with the devil,” Pickens noted, “the Jim Crow car stopped right in front of this lunchroom, so that the starving colored traveler could see the white passengers go in and out and observe their backs as they sit at the counter and drink their hot teas and cold milk and eat their warm food.”
And worse, these white customers were nearly always “served by black hands.” Pickens noted the mind-blowing hypocrisy: White passengers could “eat food out of black hands,” but would not “eat their own food out of their own hands if a black man at the other end of the counter is eating his own food out of his own hands.” To add “indigestion to insult,” a few minutes before the train resumed its journey, without fail “a Negro servant is sent out from the lunchroom with a basketful of cold food, which could never be sold to white customers, in an endeavor to get rid of it among the colored passengers.”
Indeed, while “white passengers in the lunchroom may get a hot drink or a warm egg sandwich for a few cents,” Black passengers were offered “impenetrable” chicken that had been “fried day-before-yesterday, old bread, and a slice of musty pie actually cut days ago” for seventy-five cents. If one dared to purchase such disposable fare, there was no way to consume the offensive food with dignity. If African American passengers requested utensils or a napkin they were told “No!” Railroad employees were not permitted to “bring dishes into the Jim Crow car.” It is evident, the NAACP concluded, if you are a Negro, there are “practically” no accommodations made for dining on the train.
The violence employed to police these spaces was legendary in the national Black press, especially in ML’s hometown. Atlanta’s Reverend Martin L. Harvey, who served as Dean of Men at Atlanta’s Clark College, was severely beaten for lounging in a tavern car in 1943. As his train from Chicago approached Atlanta, the train conductor shouted at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion national youth director, “Go back to the place where you belong.” The minister told the conductor his ticket class entitled him to access. But that all changed once the train entered the South. The conductor was incensed. With all his might, he rained down curses and punches upon the minister. When that proved insufficiently destructive, he grabbed a metal ashtray stand and preceded to beat the bespectacled Harvey. Black passengers and Black citizens were horrified by the measures railroad officials were willing to employ to maintain Jim Crow.
Animals do not dine at tabletops. Human beings do.
For this very reason, many African American travelers adopted “Jim Crow travel kits.” This repertoire of items included clothes as well as food, beverages, and utensils, enabling Black travelers to approximate humane travel. For decades, Black passengers exchanged suggestions and warnings via word of mouth in barbershops, beauty parlors, train depots, churches, and even the Black press.
In 1922, Reverend Bowler took to the pages of the national Chicago Defender to advise Black passengers to leave nothing to chance or the whims of railroad employees or law enforcement when traveling the rails. His Jim Crow traveling kit kept him prepared for anything the Jim Crow car threw at him. In addition to a pair of overalls, he also carried a miniature gas stove and tabletop. He explained, “the dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned because white people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water for several days.” He continued, “I cannot force myself to sneak to the back of some depot kitchen like a little poodle and ask for food; neither can I take a chance of being shot to death for attempting to invade a dining car to secure my meals.”
Therefore, Reverend Bowler stocked his luggage with salmon and canned goods, using his stove to prepare meals during his journey. Reverend Bowler’s Jim Crow traveling kit served several purposes: It helped him “ward off hunger,” while also helping him to maintain a semblance of dignity, and ultimately protect his life from the vicious vigilance of white supremacy. And the small tabletop brought a sense of dignity and propriety to the meal. Animals do not dine at tabletops. Human beings do.
In 1943, The New York Amsterdam News gave Black readers an upgraded approach: shoeboxes. Black passengers could carry their food aboard in shoeboxes, giving Black passengers the urbane appearance of a boxed lunch, the kind many railroads and train depots sold. King Hayes, a Morehouse student, recalled doing just that for his trip from Georgia to Simsbury, “ration[ing]” his food for the entire trip north. Such Jim Crow “hacks” increased the chances of survival, but did little toward achieving legal equality.
ML’s mother probably equipped him with a “shoebox” meal filled with his favorites—soul food to fill his stomach and protect his body and soul from the ravages of white supremacy.
But something led her son to try the dining car. Maybe the simple basic urge of hunger led him there; he was, after all, on a twenty-four-hour trip. Maybe curiosity led him there. It could have been a combination of desires. Whatever his reasons, as he made his way through the aisles and cars, he had no idea of the absurdity that awaited him.
In addition to violence, Southern Railway began deploying innovative ways to maintain separate and unequal dining service across its Southern routes. In 1942, Southern Railway issued new dining regulations to ensure separate and unequal dining experiences. The railroad was experiencing unprecedented demand for food as the number of train passengers swelled with the war effort. At the outbreak of war, the railroad served a total of 70,000 meals a month. When ML boarded the train in 1944, that number had increased to 350,000 meals a month, making it extremely inconvenient to host racially segregated mealtimes.
Southern’s new policy instituted segregation curtains in their dining cars. One or two tables nearest the kitchen were designated for Black passengers with a “Reserved” placard, enclosed by a heavy, thick blue curtain, while the remaining eight to ten tables were set aside for white passengers. The slim veil symbolized the gulf that existed between Black and white in America. Like the Jim Crow combination cars, these curtains kept the dining car segregated, while also thinly veiling America’s commitment to separate and unequal.
The opaque curtain was a gift to white passengers. Some claimed the sight of Black untouchable diners made them “nauseated.” The separation pampered white prejudices and soothed white conscience and stomachs. White comfort required Black dehumanization. It is easier to dehumanize flesh and bone, soul and spirit, when it is rendered invisible. Those on the outside cast their worst and wildest dreams and fantasies about the “things” dining behind the veil; while those inside the veil had to muster all their soul force not to believe what was forced upon them at every turn. The very human desire to eat required Black riders to dehumanize themselves. And if Black passengers dared to pull the curtain aside, the dining car steward would hurriedly pull the curtain closed, or worse. Protecting the sense of superiority of white passengers was the top priority.
The company’s new rules also made sure that their Southern cuisine overwhelmingly went to white passengers. Before the start of each meal, the porters pulled the curtains into “service position,” enclosing the “reserved” seats. White passengers were served first. If the white diners took all the “white” tables, “the curtain [was] pushed back, cards removed, and white passengers were served at those tables” formerly reserved for Black customers. This was inevitable on crowded war-era trains. If white travelers “fully or partially occupied” the table, “colored passengers” were “advised that they will be served just as soon as those compartments [were] vacated.”
Or, if food was available, “colored passengers” would be served at their seats “using a portable table, without the extra charge,” as soon as staff were available. This rarely happened. Southern Railway testified in court that 85 percent of the company’s white diners were served at least two helpings before Black consumers could even place their first order.
The Southern Railroad Company utilized circular logic to justify the policy. They reasoned that “relatively few Negro passengers” desired to eat in the dining car, making it pointless to reserve significant tables for the “exclusive use” of Black passengers. The proof was in the data they cooked up. Over a ten-day period, they conducted a study of 639 serving periods on all Southern Railway trains, which revealed “about 4% of the total meals served were served to Negro passengers.” The railroad did not acknowledge that their policy, not the lack of Black hunger, contributed to the low rate of Black patronage.
The company, with seemingly no federal accountability, deployed anything and everything—from violence to self-fulfilling studies—to continue to starve Black passengers of food and a sense of “somebody-ness.”
Nevertheless, in a lawsuit accusing them of discrimination, they maintained they were being falsely criticized. Southern was not racist nor lawless, they argued, but generous by reserving 10 percent of their dining-room seating (four seats out of forty) to “Negroes,” even though Black customers rarely patronized the dining car.
A few months before ML boarded the Crescent, a Black lawyer, Elmer W. Henderson, filed a complaint with the ICC regarding the train’s racist dining policies. Henderson had been denied seating in the dining car of the Crescent because white patrons were using one of the two tables “reserved” for Black patrons. Henderson was promised he would be informed when the negro table became available. He was never informed. The ICC did nothing to change the policy, declaring that Henderson was the victim of a subpar employee, not a racist dining policy. The company, with seemingly no federal accountability, deployed anything and everything—from violence to self-fulfilling studies—to continue to starve Black passengers of food and a sense of “somebody-ness.”
The policy had its intended effect on ML. He managed to get food while on board, but the cost was beyond anything he intended to pay. When the train staff issued the “negro call” for the dining car, ML began his journey from the dilapidated settees of the Jim Crow car to the plush seats of the dining car; from the stench of the Jim Crow car to the culinary aromas of the dining car. Surely keeping his parents advice in mind, ML probably kept to the racial etiquette of day: No sudden movements. Step aside for all white people. Make yourself small. Do not stare. Do not linger. Walk deliberately, but not too fast. Refer to all white people as Mr. or Mrs. Be sure to remove your hat. Don’t stand in the white line. Do not expect reciprocity. With all the boxes checked, ML arrived in the dining car.
Yet, the teenager who had been raised to believe that he was as good as any other human being was quarantined behind the veil of the dining car. “The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car,” he remembered, “I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my self hood.”12 The system of segregation robbed him of his dignity and humanity. The curtain made him feel like he was simply a thing.
And his failure to protest the system also chipped away at his sense of self hood. ML found himself complicit with white supremacy. He endured humiliation and degradation just for a meal. No matter how good the food may have been, one can’t feel satisfied when one has to forfeit their own humanity.
It is easy to imagine the teenager, once again saying to himself, “One of these days I’m gonna put my body up there where my mind is.”
But no one, especially not Southern Railway, took note of the internal yearning of the fifteen-year-old. The train, like life, continued to roll along the tracks of Jim Crow America.
But ML did manage to lift his mind. Through the windows of the Jim Crow car and the dining car, he took note of the things that amazed him, allowing the reader to see the world through his young, astonished eyes. The Crescent took him through the Southern cotton fields his father had escaped. He found himself in awe when the train stopped in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The city had a population of only thirty thousand, much smaller than Atlanta, but as a central hub for the railroad, it bustled.
ML wrote to his parents that he was amazed by the “large” city. The train passed through the majestic haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains, covering hundreds of miles of Piedmont tobacco fields and forest, as well as Civil War battlefields where blood was shed for his supposed freedom, and then up the Eastern Seaboard. Passing through Virginia and Maryland, he marveled at “the many airplanes” he saw, and the size of the navy ships. Lost for words, he compared the military might to the massive structures he knew best. “We saw many large ships,” he wrote home, “some as large as the Bethel Church and larger.”
The next major stop was the nation’s capital, the very seat of American democracy, where an original copy of ML’s beloved US Constitution resided: A Constitution that seemed meaningless in the Jim Crow car.
But when ML and crew changed to the Pennsylvania Railroad at Washington’s Union Station, their citizenship status also changed. Once the Southern Crescent pulled into the station, all trains bound north were emancipated from Jim Crow laws. ML and crew were sprung from the soul-suffocating stench of the Jim Crow car, to await their train to New York City. The clean, fresh air of freedom invigorated their spirits, as they stretched their cramped legs and souls. “It was a different experience altogether,” ML’s classmate and Atlanta native William G. Pickens recalled, “because the Pennsylvania Railroad was not segregated and we could sit any place we wanted to on the trains.”
Some of the students were so overjoyed, they extended their freedom excursion beyond schedule. According to The Maroon Tiger, the Morehouse student newspaper, several of the young men—the “wise guys,” the student paper noted—claimed they had “accidentally” got “lost from the group in Washington and New York City.” There is no record of whether ML “accidentally” got lost on a freedom excursion in the nation’s capital or the Big Apple. But he was in the midst of an admitted “general” rebellion.
One can only imagine the reaction of the otherwise vigilant Professor Dansby. True to form, he ordered the remaining Morehouse cohort to wait for the wanderlust contingent in DC. He wanted everyone to travel together. The delay caused the entire Morehouse cohort to miss their connecting train. Their arrival at the farm would be delayed costing everyone at least two days’ worth of wages.16 But for many on the journey, freedom from the Jim Crow car was priceless.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. by Lerone Martin. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by Lerone Martin.
Leave a Reply