Jim Crow-era train car one step closer to being restored in Rowan County

ROWAN COUNTY, N.C. — North Carolina’s Transportation Museum in Spencer is one step closer to restoring an old train car from the Jim Crow era.

"This is the seating section for white passengers,” said Tyler Trahan, Historic Interpreter with the museum, as he gave reporter Tina Terry a tour of the car on Tuesday.

It was built in 1928 for Southern Railway and was specifically used to separate black and white passengers from each other.

Accommodations during that time period were supposed to be separate but equal, but Livingstone College Historian Da’Tarvia Parrish said that most often wasn’t the case.

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"This whole Jim Crow era, what it did was produce second class citizens, and that’s what blacks were fighting for first class citizenship,” she said.

"It was the conductor's responsibility to figure out what race a person was and their word was final,” said Trahan. “If the conductor said they were black, and they said they were white, the conductor could stop the train and have the person arrested."

The museum received a grant from the National Park Service of more than a quarter-million dollars. The money will be used to refurbish the old car and educate the public.

"Segregated train cars were a big part of North Carolina’s history and this is a really good tool for telling that story,” said Trahan.

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