In Pullman, a mural created this year aims to capture the history of the Pullman porters.
Artist Joe Nelson, who goes by CUJODAH, worked with Union Pacific Railroad and the National Park Foundation to create the massive dedication to the Pullman porters painted on viaducts at 109th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, where the Pullman railcar factory once stood.
The piece centers on a porter in a blue uniform standing with the historic Administration Clock Tower Building glowing in the background, with the sky a mix oranges and yellows.
“You really can’t tell, you know, if there’s a sunset or sunrise,” Nelson says. “It just shows when people were getting ready to go to sleep or waking up, they were there, and they were up and ready to work.”
The porters worked on businessman George M. Pullman’s luxury sleeping cars in an age when rail travel was popular. They helped spur the Great Migration, and they grew the Black middle class through an organized-labor push that resulted in the first agreement between a company and a Black union.
While working on the mural, Nelson says he tried to learn more about the porters than what he remembered from elementary school.
“It was a grueling job, it was a tough job, but they were making way,” Nelson says. “I feel like those kind of standards and that type of energy absolutely carries over to what a lot of people are going through today.”
Former President Barack Obama dedicated the Pullman National Monument in 2015, establishing what’s now the first national park in Chicago.
The mural spans two viaduct walls and includes inscriptions that offer glimpses of the history Nelson tried to explain in “layman’s terms.” The text appears out of cloud-like bubbles.
You can see one of the green sleeping cars, where porters served passengers, and other items, such as luggage, that Nelson included to represent the work the porters did.
Nelson says he was trying to “create a feeling and a mood of just the time. I want people to feel that energy. I want them to feel the power and the strength and the dedication of these larger-than-life icons that the Pullman porters were.”
He based the mural on a vintage-looking train poster he created for the grand opening of the visitors center at the Pullman National Historic Park in 2021.
Nelson hopes the mural inspires people to want to learn more about the porters’ history.
“I want people to kind of dig into the story themselves and, you know, find out themselves, like, what it was and what it meant,” he says.
Other murals in the neighborhood also pay tribute to the area’s history, including one by artist Rahmaan Statik that includes portraits of Pullman and Obama and images of historical sites in Pullman.
