One Porter's Long Ride To Racial Justice

------------------------------------------------------------------ EARLIER THIS YEAR, a court settlement concluded 27 years of legal battles that awarded $24.5 million to 273 current and former railroad employees who are African American.

The largest per-person awards in the history of class-action civil-rights suits went to 73 former train porters and 200 former chair-car attendants. They had sued their employer, Santa Fe Railway, and the United Transportation Union, charging racial discrimination and seeking damages commensurate with the wages they lost by being barred from white-only jobs.

Along the way, the case reverberated through train yards and back yards, courtrooms and living rooms across the United States. Before it ended, the results of one man's action would make history, affecting the fairness, the fabric, indeed, the very rhythm of many people's lives. ------------------------------------------------------------------ First of two parts

The rhythm of his life rumbled beneath him, the steady pounding of steel wheels on steel rails. Outside steel walls, the deep-throated whistle of Santa Fe's El Capitan cut through the night.

Joe Sears moved up and down the aisle of his passenger car with grace and precision, sweeping trash from the aisles, helping passengers off and onto the train at stops, producing pillows for those who tilted back in their Pullman chairs. He had worked for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway all his adult life, starting in 1936 on the least-pleasant and lowest-paying rung of the trainman's employment ladder: chair-car attendant. Promoted to porter, he had taken and passed the tests required for promotion to brakeman in '36. He had learned every job on the train, and had trained those who became porters, brakemen, firemen, conductors and engineers.

But this night, Aug. 11, 1965, he was working his regular job as a chair-car attendant. His name was on the extra board to go on runs as a porter if vacancies occurred on his days off, and he hoped to someday return to being a full-time porter. Early in his career, he'd hoped for more. But even though he'd applied more than once for promotion to brakeman, by now, at age 53, he had ruefully accepted the response he'd received years before when he had mentioned to a white brakeman that he'd like to do that job someday.

"You can't become a brakeman until your skin changes color," the man told him.

And so Joe Sears had worked for 29 years at less than his capacity for less than his worth. Still, working for the Santa Fe was considered a choice job among blacks. It was steady, and you could earn enough to ensure your kids a college education.

That was his goal for the four children who waited with his wife in Kansas City, Kan. It was midnight. Aug. 10, 1965. In another three hours, the El Capitan would complete its Chicago-to-Kansas City run. He was nearly home.

The next day, Joe Sears' life changed forever: Riots began in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Sears sat in his living room with his wife, Christine, and the kids, watching the riots on television.

He knew those people on that TV screen. He shared their years of being invisible and beaten down. He shared their anger.

"And I leaped up outta my chair and - I'll never forget it - I said, `If I was there, I'd burn some of 'em too!' "

Christine Sears remembers. "I said, `Why Joe, why would you say that?' And then it all came pouring out. All the frustrations and humiliations and everything."

That day in 1965, he told them about his job. He told them he knew "what those fellas were trying to fight, whether they knew it or not." He told them how his bosses refused to promote him. "They never argued about the fact that I was qualified to do the work. They just didn't let me do it, that's all."

The next morning, Christine typed a letter in which Joe once more applied to Santa Fe for a brakeman's job. The reply came back that, at 53, he was too old to be a brakeman. The age limit was 35. Application denied.

He had expected that. Planned for it. Five weeks before the Watts riots, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect. Joe had seen Justice Department ads and commercials explaining that discrimination in public accommodations, publicly owned facilities, employment and union membership were now against the law, and urging those who knew of discrimination to report it.

Did they mean it? Had the rules really changed? Was it possible that he now had the law on his side? Did he no longer have to carry the anger inside him like a time bomb ticking? Like the rhythm of his life?

On March 8, 1966, Joe Vernon Sears - a shy, quiet man who had never complained and always gotten along - decided to seek answers. He drove to the office of the Commission on Civil Rights in Topeka, where he filed a complaint against Santa Fe and the United Transportation Union.

Seven months later, Sears came awake in the panic that a ringing phone brings at 2 a.m. His mind riffled through possible family crises as he reached for the phone.

But it wasn't a relative. It was an investigator from the Kansas Civil Rights Commission, the latest in a long line of those assigned to his complaint against the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

"They just kept stalling," he recalled today. "Sometimes they'd send one of their field people out and talk to me, ask me what was wrong. We'd talk for an hour or so. They'd leave, and a few weeks later another would come out. Four or five different people came out."

Now one of them was calling at 2 a.m.

"Joe," he said, "I have a job offer that I'm going to accept as head of the EEOC office for Virginia and West Virginia. And I'm going to take your file with me and get it to the EEOC in Washington, D.C."

Sears said that was fine with him. Maybe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington would do something, maybe it wouldn't. But he was convinced the state of Kansas wasn't going to do anything about it. And he had a run the next day. He hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

In May of '68, Sears received another phone call. This one was from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, telling him the EEOC had found reasonable cause that the company and the union had violated his civil rights. The agency would begin taking depositions, Humphrey said, to determine whether Sears was eligible to file a lawsuit against the company and the union. And just two months later, Santa Fe promoted the first black to a brakeman's job on the Eastern Line.

On Oct. 7, 1972, Joe Sears was working as a porter for Amtrak, which in 1971 took over virtually all passenger service from the ailing railroads. That day he was notified by the EEOC that he was entitled to sue the railroad and the union under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

On Nov. 1, 1972, lawyer Terry Paup, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Wichita to stop Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Co. and the United Transportation Union - which had succeeded the BRT - from discriminating against blacks and to collect damages.

The court certified the lawsuit as a class action on behalf of Sears and the 72 other black porters employed by Santa Fe from the time the Civil Rights Act took effect in 1965.

Nearly three years waiting, and the case still hadn't come to trial. It was Aug. 25, 1975, when the last Santa Fe porter retired.

His name was Joe Sears.

He made the run from Newton to Purcell, Okla., then rode back to Kansas City as a passenger.

"I could have worked longer," he said, "but I had developed a bit of rheumatism in the hip. I found out that was stress, and the minute I got off, it went away. I sure wasn't sad to leave. But I was sad that the case hadn't come to trial yet."

It was 10 years since Sears had decided to use the Civil Rights Act to fight job discrimination. The Vietnam War had begun the same year and had ended in 1973. But the lawsuit was still there, moving through depositions and inquiries, motions and meetings, even though the job of porter no longer existed.

He may never have gotten his promotion, but Sears was determined to get his day in court.

Tomorrow in The Times: "You're never gonna beat the Santa Fe," he was told. But Sears did just that, albeit 27 years later.

---------------------------------------- BACKGROUND ON SANTA FE PASSENGER SERVICE ----------------------------------------

THE JOBS AT ISSUE

Chair-car attendant: Chair-car attendants were African Americans who did custodial work on passenger trains, loaded and unloaded passengers, attended to passenger requests and kept the cars' interiors clean.

Porter: Porters were African Americans who made more money than chair-car attendants, less money than brakemen, and did both jobs, in addition to providing any other assistance the conductor needed.

Brakeman: Brakemen were whites who guided the movement of the trains, throwing switches to change tracks, coupling and uncoupling cars and signaling oncoming trains.

THE ROUTE

The Santa Fe Eastern Line ran from Chicago to Albuquerque, N.M. All porters in the lawsuit worked for the Eastern Line, as did most of the chair-car attendants. Some attendants worked on Santa Fe's Western Line, which ran from Silsbee, Texas, to California, and on the Pacific Coast Line.

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