Southern Railway Car Number 1200
Pullman Company · 1923, converted to a segregated car in 1940
A full sized green railway carriage sits in the middle of the segregation gallery, and you can walk through it. Built by the Pullman Company in nineteen twenty three for the Southern Railway, it was rebuilt in nineteen forty as a partitioned car: one section for white passengers with wide seats, a lounge and a smoking room, and a smaller section for Black passengers behind a wall, with plainer seats and a water cooler marked for coloured use. Nothing explains Jim Crow as directly as walking from one end to the other.
Look at the details. The white section has upholstered seats and a mens smoking lounge with leather chairs; the coloured section has fewer windows and the seats are harder. The luggage racks, the lighting and the fittings change on either side of the partition. This was not a matter of custom but of law, enforced by conductors and by the threat of violence, on every train that crossed the South until the Interstate Commerce Commission and the courts finally ended it in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
The car was retired in the nineteen fifties and later preserved by a railway museum in North Carolina, which gave it to the Smithsonian. Like the slave cabin and the prison guard tower nearby, it was lowered into the building by crane in twenty thirteen, before the walls went up, because it is far too big to bring through the doors. Standing on the coloured side and looking through the partition is an experience many visitors remember for years.
Did You Know? The carriage weighs about forty tonnes and was craned into the unfinished building in twenty thirteen; the museum was then built around it.
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