What information is available about African American transcontinental railroad construction and other workers?
Professor John Hoyt William’s book “A Great and Shining Road” recounts that “the Union Pacific did employ several hundred black workers on the Plains” [p.94] to build the line. According to “Moguls and Iron Men” by James McCague, included in the Union Pacific’s mostly Irish construction workers was a “three-hundred-man force of Negro freedmen of whom little is known except that they were said to have made good workers” [p.117]. > Based on passing mentions in some news articles, it appears that the Central Pacific used African-Americans [as sleeping car porters] on their Silver Palace Cars in the 1870s. Perhaps surprising in California, but there seems to have been a fair sized African-American community in the state back then. I’ve also come across mentions of the African-American community in Sacramento during that period, larger than one might expect.
