Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois is scheduled to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives on Friday, Feb. 3, to begin the process of turning Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood into a national historical park.
The bill will authorize the Department of the Interior to study the possibility of making the neighborhood a unit of the National Park Service.
The project caught Jackson’s eye because of his considerable personal interest in history, said his Washington office spokesperson, Frank Watkins. “This is an historic area, the site of the historic Pullman company, which involved the African-American porters who worked on the Pullman line. So there’s a lot of crossover: history, manufacturing, Pullman, and African-Americans in the company.”
Built in 1880-84 on the south side of Chicago as the nation’s first planned model industrial town, the town of Pullman housed workers and executives of the Pullman Palace Car Company, which built railroad sleeper cars.
Nearly nine thousand people lived in the town by 1885, most of them employees of the company and their families. While the town was annexed into the City of Chicago in 1889, Pullman continued to draw international interest, even receiving recognition in 1896 as “The World’s Most Perfect Town” at the International Hygienic and Pharmaceutical Exposition in Prague.
Crossing the country in a Pullman car became one of the iconic American adventures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Equally iconic were the African-American porters who served travelers on these cars, making them some of the most visible and well-known employees in the railroad industry.
The Pullman Company employed one of the largest black workforces of its time, but the era’s racial discrimination issues prevailed even in the company’s outwardly benevolent atmosphere. Porters often worked extra set-up and clean-up time without pay, depended on tips for much of their income, and were refused opportunities to advance within the company. Eventually, they rallied and formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first labor organization led by African-Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor.
In 1894, the town of Pullman became the scene of the most famous and far-reaching labor conflict of its kind, spurred by the failed labor negotiations over declining wages in a period of economic depression. Factory workers walked out, the American Railway Union boycotted Pullman cars, and the federal government had to step in to resolve the conflict and get the trains running once again. The resulting violence and the government's interference made Pullman a rallying cry for increased federal regulation and the need for unions.
In 1898, after the death of company president George M. Pullman, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman Company to sell all of the property in Pullman that was not used for industry. By 1907, all the residential buildings in Pullman were sold, and they continue to be privately owned.
Despite its history and the meticulous preservation of its residential and commercial buildings through the years, the Pullman historic district has met with opposition to its survival. A grassroots campaign thwarted a movement in the 1960s to tear down the old buildings and replace the district with an industrial park. Out of this grew the Historic Pullman Foundation, which now oversees the district’s preservation. Today the exteriors of the houses remain much as they were in the 1880s, and many of the community buildings—the historic Florence Hotel and the Greenstone Church, for example—have been carefully preserved and restored. The town received the designation of Illinois Historic District in 1969, and it became a National Landmark District in 1970.
Congressman Jackson has demonstrated his passion for historic events and their reflection on modern times as the author of A More Perfect Union: Advancing New American Rights. “We went on a tour of battlefields throughout the south, and wrote the book,” said Watkins, who is credited as the book’s co-author. To complete their research on race as a social and political pivot point in our nation’s history, Jackson and Watkins visited 20 of the 28 Civil War battlefields preserved by the National Park Service.
Watkins added, “He often quotes, ‘If we don’t know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we’re going.’”
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