African American Railroad Workers of Roanoke: Oral Histories of the Norfolk & Western

By Scarborough, Sheree and Historical Society of Western Virginia

Roanoke, Virginia, is one of America's great historic railroad centers. The Norfolk & Western Railway Company, now the Norfolk Southern Corporation, has been in Roanoke for over a century. Since the company has employed many of the city's African Americans, the two histories are intertwined. The lives of Roanoke's black railroad workers span the generations from Jim Crow segregation to the civil rights era to today's diverse corporate workforce. Older generations toiled through labor-intensive jobs such as janitors and track laborers, paving the way for younger African Americans to become engineers, conductors and executives. Join author Sheree Scarborough as she interviews Roanoke's African American railroad workers and chronicles stories that are a powerful testament of personal adversity, struggle and triumph on the rail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625850201

Scarborough, Sheree

Sheree Scarborough is a historian specializing in oral and public history. She has worked with various institutions over her over thirty-year career, including NASA/Johnson Space Center, the Library of Congress and the University of Texas Law School. The former director of the Frank Erwin Oral History Project in Austin, Sheree has written numerous publications on oral history and other topics. She has been the director for the Cotton to Silk Oral History Project in Roanoke, Virginia, most recently. Dr. DeLaney is an associate professor of history and director of Africana studies at Washington & Lee University. His research interests include comparative slavery in the Western hemisphere, African American history and civil rights. He is currently writing the story of school desegregation in four western Virginian counties. Dr. Sullivan III is an emeritus professor of English at East Carolina University and is on the summer faculty at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Over his thirty-four-year career, he has won numerous awards and grants, and has published over fifty articles and ten books in the fields of American folklore, fantasy and Celtic studies. He worked two summers as a "gandy dancer" on the Delwaware & Hudson Railway. Kegley is the editor of the Journal of the Historical Society of Western Virginia, director emeritus of the society and retired business editor of the Roanoke Times. He has lived in Roanoke all of his adult life and volunteers in many local organizations. He was named citizen of the year by the Roanoke City Council in 2002 and received an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 2001 from his alma mater Roanoke College.

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Reviews for African American Railroad Workers of Roanoke

[alco261 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

African American Railroad Workers of Roanoke is a collection of 12 oral histories of N&W railroad workers. They are selected from a group of 20 interviews conducted by the author in 2013 which was an outgrowth of the 1998 oral history effort “African American Heritage on the Norfolk & Western 1930-1970” undertaken by the Virginia Museum of Transport. Once in text form the recording transcripts were sent to the interviewees for approval and re-editing. The interviewee ages ranged from 40 to 98 and their years of service were between 2 and 47 years. The spectrum of occupations included a janitor, clerk, cook, track gang member, machinist, police officer, fireman, brakeman, engineer, conductor, and vice-president. The two major themes of the series of personal experiences in this book are those of succeeding in spite of job segregation and succeeding after that segregation had been removed. In every instance the narrator provides information concerning their upbringing and the events that drove their decision to work for the N&W. Each one also gives ample credit to those individuals and neighborhood institutions which provided support, encouragement, and help during their time working for the railroad. By their very nature, oral histories are somewhat disjointed and when these histories are transcribed to printed text they can be presented in a question and answer style or as a narrative. The format of this book is the latter. According to the author, this form of presentation does “[leave] more room for the stories and increase their impact” however the readers interest in the narrative waxes and wanes depending on the eloquence of the narrator. As a result, the transcribed experiences span the spectrum from somewhat difficult-to-follow to near page turning adventure. I think the book is a good addition to the collection of first person accounts of railroad work.