Train trip, 1948, by Jim Low

From MemoryArchive

Who: My family
What: Train trip
When: October 1948
Where: Toronto to Edmonton

My Father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was transferred every couple of years, and the entire family was regularly uprooted. In October 1948, when I was eight years old, we took the train to Edmonton when my Father was transferred. We had a compartment, where we all slept and was regularly visited by a porter to make the beds up at night and take them down each morning. I recall the three day trip where I befriended a porter and “helped” him by following him about as he undertook his duties. As we neared Edmonton, I said to my mother that I was going to be a porter when I grew up. She smiled and said “you can’t, as you have to be a Negro to be a porter.”

It was my first experience with discrimination. But my thought was "why should a white person be prohibited from becoming a porter?"