Tag Archives: Civil Rights movement

ON MY LIST: Eatonville, Black America’s living memorial

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While the new MLK Memorial was being dedicated in Washington DC last week amid much hype, a living monument to black American dreams and resilience was quietly going about life in central Florida.

I’ve never been a big fan of Florida.

Beaches, we’ve already got on the West Coast, without the possibility of having an alligator turn up on your patio. Heat. Humidity. Hurricanes. That whole “hanging chad” thing. I’m just not feelin’ it.

Or rather, I wasn’t…until I heard about Eatonville.

It’s a little ways north of Orlando. If you think of it at all, it’s most likely to be as a small spot on your car’s GPS enroute to Disneyworld.

It’s small — really small. Blink twice while you’re driving and you could miss the whole place. Population: 2,500 and change. There are high schools in this country with more people than that.

It’s not sitting on some great lake, mighty river or endless seacoast. Nothing of great value was discovered there.

Then again, maybe something was.

The source is in the town history. The clue is in the town’s Web site:

“Welcome to the Town of Eatonville
The Oldest Incorporated African American Municipality in America”

That, I guarantee, would be more than enough to slow my roll to Disneyworld.

In some ways, that Eatonville ever existed at all, and still survives today, may qualify as a small miracle.

The town was first formed in 1863 by slaves freed during the Civil War. It didn’t incorporate until 1887, after a small group of white landowners, including one Florida mayor, Josiah Eaton, sold some land to a group of black Floridians who longed for a community of their own, where they could build their own businesses and feel safe.

Not a gift, but a purchase. Not 40 acres and a mule, but 112 acres — and a town.

Eatonville survived the Civil War. It survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Black Codes. It survived the white backlash that destroyed the Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK and led to Florida’s own Rosewood Massacre. It survived the Great Depression.

And it has survived its share of hurricanes.

Just last weekend, the new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. was dedicated, amid much hype and fanfare. And to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, it was fitting and proper to do so.

But MLK himself did not survive the Civil Rights movement. Eatonville did.

Along the way, it produced some notable names. One of them was Zora Neale Hurston, one of America’s most gifted and respected black writers.

It also gave birth to David “Deacon” Jones, the Hall of Fame NFL defensive end who invented the term “sack,” and taught a whole generation of opposing quarterbacks — painfully — what it meant.

Today, Eatonville goes on about its life as a town that is roughly 4 percent Latino or Hispanic, 7 percent white and 89 percent black. It has a town hall and a town council. It has a library and a community center. It holds community events — movie screenings, exercise classes.

And it has people who are proud of their town’s heritage and are working to maintain it, including annual August celebrations of its founding.

There are no national monuments or memorials honoring Eatonville, and just as well. It is its own monument, to perseverance, a spirit of entrepreneurship, of community. It’s not big. It’s not rich. But by God, it endures.

Disneyworld may have to wait awhile. Eatonville is on my list.

TEXAS: I’ve been railroaded

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© Nico Smit | Dreamstime.com

I was certain I’d never want to visit the state for fun — until I found out about the Museum of the American Railroad.

When it comes to our preferences, we can be pretty extremist. We like what we like, we loathe what we loathe and that’s that. The older I get, though, the more of a flip-flopper I’m becoming.

As a kid, I sternly rejected an invitation by friends in San Francisco who wanted to introduce me to this Mexican food called tacos. It would be almost a decade before I relented.

That was many years — and many tacos — ago.

I was just as absolutist about music. On my transistor radio (ask your grandfather what a transistor was), it was R&B, rock ‘n roll and jazz. In that order. Period.

Classical? Not really. Folk? Not so much.

Country? Oh, HELL no!

Then I heard the guitar of Andres Segovia. The protests inspired by the Vietnam war introduced me to folk music. And I eventually learned that some of my favorite R&B songs by artists like Ray Charles drew their inspiration from country tunes, and vice versa.

That’s when I realized that if you listen to any musical form long enough, you’ll hear something you like.

PLACES YOU LOVE — OR NOT
What’s this got to do with travel? Simply this: Absolutes apply just as much to places.

There are places we fall in love with. I mean that helpless, hopeless, head-over-heels variety of love. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know some of mine. San Francisco, London, Paris, Vancouver, Amsterdam.

It works the same way in reverse. There are places where we would sooner spend a night curled up in a cactus Snuggie before we’d spend a day of vacation there.

At the top of my list: Texas.

Too big. Too flat. Too hot and too dry — unless, of course, it’s too humid.

Above all, too Texan.

Texas is where I annually lost my mind as a kid during my family’s summer drives across the state — and back.

How bored was I? When you start memorizing AAA road maps while lying on an ice chest behind the front seat of a 1958 Buick, you have reached the ultimate in desperate circumstances.

Unlike the Beatles song, Texas to me was a long road that didn’t wind.

TARBALLS AND BROKEN BONES
Texas is where my cousins in Houston taught me to look forward to summer downpours — so we could go play in the flooded streets.

Texas is where I played in the surf at Galveston, and came out with shorts stained by tarballs from offshore oil wells.

Texas is where a wasp crawled up my shirt sleeve and stung me in the armpit, where I broke my thumb in a car crash — and I wasn’t even driving.

For a long time, I wondered why California got earthquakes and Texas got barbecue, when it clearly should’ve been the other way around.

After the crash, I was about ready to rename Texas the Leave Me Alone Star State. And I fully expected it to stay that way for the rest of my life.

In hindsight, I should’ve known better.

It started with an item that turned up on my Facebook from TrainWeb. An announcement:

“Museum of the American Railroad ready to break ground and move to Frisco.”

I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. One of my favorite things in the world — trains — was coing to one of my favorite places in the world — San Francisco — in the form of a major museum?

FRISCO, NOT “FRISCO”
Mentally, I was already making air reservations to SFO, planning my BART ride into The City and trying to decide whether I wanted to stay in a hotel on Nob Hill, in the South of Market or in Fisherman’s Wharf.

I was so happy, I was even willing to overlook TrainWeb’s reference to San Francisco as “Frisco,” which for more than a few San Franciscans, marks you as a tourist and a legitimate target for disdain.

Then I clicked on the link and read the Dallas Morning News story. the museum was indeed moving to Frisco.

Frisco, TX. A suburb of Dallas.

A moment earlier, I’d been dying with excitement. Now, I was just dying. The crash of my disappointment probably tripped seismographs in a dozen western states.

Grudgingly, I checked out the museum’s Web site.

Wow, these guys are serious! Steam locomotives, electric and diesel-electric locomotives of the old streamlined types that my generation grew up seeing.

Cabooses. Every kid I went to school with — the boys, anyway — at some point in their adolescence fantasized about riding in one of these.

Pullman sleeper cars of the type one of my great-uncles worked on from the age of 15 as a Pullman porter out of New Orleans.

(That part of American railroad history resides in Chicago at the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum. If you’re interested in the history of the Civil Rights movement as well as American railroading, you owe it to yourself to check it out).

It all harkens back to the days when trains were not only the best way, but the only way to move around the country efficiently and in any degree of comfort.

If nothing else, it’ll give you an idea of just how goos our rail system used to be — before freeways, airlines, Congress and Amtrak, among others, nearly killed it.

Even better, the new museum is being built in the style of one of America’s grand old railroad stations, the North Station in Boston.

Oh yeah, I can get into this.

So here I sit, facing the harsh realization that I may have to rethink my perpetual dismissal of Texas. People who like trains this much much can’t be all bad.

You think they have decent barbecue in Frisco?

TRAINS: The Amtrak Crescent

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One of an occasional series

It also could be called the train that walks on water and flies through kudzu.

Rather than fly from California to Washington DC, I decided to fly into New Orleans and from there, take Amtrak to the nation’s capital, a run of 27 1/2 hours

The Amtrak Crescent gets its name from New Orleans, nicknamed “the Crescent City.” Its roughly 1,400-mile route gently meanders up through the “Dirty South” to the Eastern Seaboard, terminating in New York City.

Three long-distance trains operate out of here — the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles, the City of New Orleans to Chicago and the Crescent.

When I took my first big train trip out of here as a kid, the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal was still new. It was my own little Cape Canaveral — and it launched my dreams.

These days, the station exists in a kind of twilight zone — not old or ornate enough to look grandly “historic,” too plain and tired to be viewed as modern. There are few distractions inside beyond a 120-foot-long mural of Louisiana history.

RIGHT ON TIME
The Crescent offers sleeper compartments for its First Class passengers, but I was in Coach for this trip. There also were diner, lounge and baggage cars. Unless your suitcase is the size of a car, you probably can bring it aboard with you.

Train 20, the northbound Crescent, rolled out right on time at 7 a.m., passing the New Orleans Arena, as well as several cemeteries, with the above-ground crypts for which the city is famous.

We slid through the greenery and lagoons of City Park, crossed the Industrial Canal and rolled atop the levee that (theoretically) protects New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

On one side, the saltwater lake stretches 40 miles wide from east to west. On the other, mile after mile of swampy bayou, dotted with rickety fishing shacks of weathered wood, sitting on equally weathered wooden stilts. Here too are the abandoned ruins of Lincoln Beach, site of the blacks-only amusement park before integration closed it in 1965.

Back in the day, the bus ride out here from uptown New Orleans to this lonely spot out in the Ninth Ward seemed to take forever; it was the end of the line in more ways than one. Waiting there were carousels, bumper cars, a man-made beach and a swimming pool full of cloudy, chlorinated water, where you would be dive-bombed by huge, biting sand flies.

DOES THIS TRAIN FLOAT?
A lot of famed black musicians performed out here. Fats Domino was a regular.

Its only visitors these days arrive by kayak.

Then came the lake itself, and the VERY low railroad bridge that ran across it. A single, straight line of track, much narrower than the train it supported.

Look down from your window seat and you see nothing but water, a sight that bemused some and unnerved others. But we made it into the cross-lake suburb of Slidell without anyone getting wet.

Less than an hour later, we were in Mississippi, and our rail journey began in earnest.

In all, the Crescent has 30 stops between New Orleans and New York. Most of those stops are in rural country — four in Mississippi, three each in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, five in North Carolina and six in Virginia.

(If you wonder why Virginia made out so well, you need only look at its proximity to Washington DC.)

The route itself partly explains why Amtrak passenger service has survived, despite all political efforts to kill it off.

Its annual ridership of not quite 300,00 people puts it in eighth place among Amtrak’s 15 long-distance trains, but its importance to the region far outweighs the numbers. For a great many people, it’s their only real link to the rest of the country that doesn’t require them to drive hundreds of miles.

Hurricane Katrina disrupted the run for several months. Its ridership has risen every year since.

THE VINE THAT ATE THE SOUTH
The dining car menu is pretty much Amtrak-standardized, especially at breakfast and lunch. If the dining car ever offers any Cajun or Creole dinner specialties on this run, go for it.

This trip introduced me to kudzu, an Asian vine that was introduced into the South in the 1930s.

Somebody made a BIG mistake. Kudzu ran amok.

Miles of farmland have been swallowed up by it. Whole pine forests disappear under this stuff, along with telephone poles, tractors — and as you can see if you look carefully at the pic — the occasional house. In some places, it literally blots out the sun.

Down here, they call kudzu “the vine that ate the South.”

Pray that it doesn’t ask for seconds.

Many of the places that figured in the Civil Rights movement are stops on the Crescent’s route. Hattiesburg, Laurel and Meridian, MS. Birmingham and Anniston, AL. Greenville, SC and Greensboro, NC. A history lesson on rails.

You also roll through or past the ancestral lands of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes of Native Americans, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes.

HISTORY AND HERITAGE
Night had long fallen by the time we hit Atlanta, and on the northbound run, you sleep through the Carolinas to awaken in Virginia, rolling past Civil War battlefields like Manassas.

You know what happened here all those years ago and why, but you can’t picture it. These fields are too peaceful, too achingly lovely, to be sullied by mental images of smoke and horror and dying men. So your eyes drink in the beauty and the peace, and your brain says that’s enough for one trip.

At 9:30 a.m., precisely 27 1/2 hours after leaving New Orleans, we rolled into Washington DC and its lovingly restored Union Station. The train was now crowded with a mix of long-distance travelers from New Orleans and suited-and-booted professionals from the Virginia suburbs, commuting to their Capitol jobs.

The train would make four more stops before reaching New York’s Penn Station, but my journey ended here. It’s a journey I would love to repeat someday.

The 4-1-1
TRAIN: The Crescent
OPERATOR: Amtrak
ROUTE: New Orleans — New York (Train 19 southbound, Train 20 northbound)
DISTANCE: 1,377 miles (NOTE: The distance on the Coast Starlight between Los Angeles and Seattle is exactly the same. Weird.)
STOPS: 30
TIME: 30 hours (approximate)
TRAINSET: Viewliner cars (single-deck), Coach seats, First Class roomettes & bedrooms, dining, lounge, cafe and baggage cars
RIDERSHIP: 300,000 annual (approximate), 800-plus daily average

The View from the Train

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Local trains, Florence, Italy. | © G. Gross

These days, there are two kinds of air travelers — those who are sick of flying and those who soon will be. A good train makes a great alternative.

My friend Walt flies all over the world for his job. He has enough frequent flyer miles to circumnavigate the globe 40 times. Do you envy him?

Don’t.

“I hate flying. I’m sick of flying. I almost can’t stand to get on an airplane anymore.”

French TGV at Roissy CDG airport, Paris

Back in the day, air travel was fun, romantic, thrilling. In the immortal words of B.B. King, the thrill is gone. In its place are security screeners who treat you like luggage, baggage handlers who treat your luggage like garbage, and airlines that treat you like cattle.

Did the airline overbook your flight? Too many ounces of Listerine in your toiletry kit? Do you have to run through terminals like O.J. Simpson? And why do the screeners want you to take your shoes and your belt off?

What’s next, a lap dance?

TORTURE, NOT TRAVEL
Just getting yourself to the airport often means long drives through hellish traffic, only to descend into a maze of taxis, shuttle buses and other travelers, all jockeying for the same unavailable space.

This is not travel. This is torture.

Okay, I freely admit to being a train nut. My friend Carl tells me that true rail fanatics are called “foamers.” Not sure I qualify; I’ve had all my shots. But I love traveling on clean, comfortable, well-run trains.

Pullman porter

There’s also a personal connection. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, one of my great-uncles was a Pullman porter on the Sunset Limited, the first train I ever rode. The story of the Pullman porters and their struggle for dignity plays a major role in the Civil Rights movement.

Today, there’s a growing movement among Americans to return to a modernized and faster rail system.

Buy your ticket. Head to the platform. Climb aboard, stash your bag, find your seat. Show the conductor your ticket. That’s it. Leave from and arrive in the heart of town.

You can watch all the scenery you’ll never see from “our cruising altitude of 39,000 feet.” There’s a place to plug in your laptop or spread out your picnic lunch and your bottle of wine. If you paid extra for a compartment, you have a cozy little bedroom by night. An attendant will turn the bed down for you.

WORLD-CLASS SPEED
You will not be told to fasten your seatbelt because of turbulence. There is no turbulence. There is no seatbelt.

The high-speed passenger trains of Europe and Asia are the best of all. Trains like Japan’s pioneering Shinkansen and South Korea’s KTX, the French TGV, the German ICE train (the pun can’t be helped, but that’s just a cool name for a train), Spain’s AVE and the Eurostar Italia whisk you to and from your destinations at speed approaching or exceeding 200 miles per hour.

A Eurostar train takes you from London to Paris, under the English Channel via the famous tunnel, in a shade over two hours.

Bar car, Napa Valley Wine Train | © G. Gross

When traffic is at its worst, you can’t get from Roissy CDG airport to central Paris in two hours.

Most of these lines are so fast that they don’t even bother with sleeper cars. You’re going too fast to read the signs telling you the names of the picturesque little villages and towns you’re bypassing (those are left to slower local trains).

In Europe, many airlines don’t even try to compete with them on short-haul routes anymore.

SLOW BUT SCENIC
Here in the United States, even bedraggled Amtrak is gaining travelers weary of the air nightmare and rising gas prices. In summer, Amtrak’s more popular lines are selling out and running full at peak times.

Go north and you’ve got one of the most beautiful transcontinental rail trips in the world, the Trans-Canada.

Stations in New York, Chicago, Washington DC and Los Angeles have regained the buzz they maintained a half-century ago, when train travel was “it.”

Being slower allows Amtrak to run sleeper cars across the American continent. They charge per trip for one of their compartments, regardless of the number of people using it, which makes them cheaper than first-class airfares. All your meals are included — real food in a real dining car.

Lunch, Napa Valley Wine Train

Speaking of food, there are excursion trains and dinner trains that don’t really take you anywhere except to a great time, day trips lasting just long enough to treat you to gorgeous views and sumptuous meals aboard restored antique trains. The Napa Valley Wine Train is an example.

Want ultra-luxury? A few well-heeled rail buffs maintain their own antique railcars, which Amtrak attaches to their own trains for trips around the country. When their owners aren’t using them, they’ll often rent them out.

Bottom line: If you’re willing to be miserable for the sake of speed, flying still wins. But when you’re ready to actually enjoy going somewhere, think rails instead of wings.