“More and More Intolerable”: News Article on Jim Crow Train Travel

Background: The Southwestern Christian Advocate was an African American weekly newspaper funded and governed by the Methodist Episcopal Church. It featured the writings of prominent Black Methodist ministers directed to a largely non-Creole African American middle class in New Orleans. In the 1890s, under the leadership of Rev. A. P. E. Albert, the paper closely covered the rise of white supremacy and supported community struggles for equal rights.

Travel in the South, for colored people is getting to be more and more intolerable. Not only is the separate coach law being enforced in the ordinary coaches, but efforts are being made to drive respectable colored people, fully able to pay the additional tariff, out of the sleeping car. A few days ago a colored man was forcibly ejected out of a sleeping car in Texas by State authorities. More recently a Pullman Car conductor was arrested in Shreveport for carrying a colored passenger on his car. The negro porter is all right, but the Negro passenger is an offense, and must be driven out. It remains to be seen how long our people will continue to submit to such inhuman treatment without testing the constitutionality of this Jim Crow car law. The American Citizens’ Equal Rights Association, cooperating with the committee of citizens which was organized in the Crusader office the other day, propose to make the infamy an issue, before the Supreme Court of the Nation. Let every self-respecting colored man, contribute his means, and let every friend of public right and justice unite with their help and sympathy in the movement. Contributions will be received and credited to the cause at this office.

Source: Southwestern Christian Advocate, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 19, 1891, n.p.