Fragment about one Kaiser train from the Northeast-

 

On 21 December 1939, far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath, the Abilene Reporter-News printed a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor had said that “a great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by comparison.” (In the 1850s Oregon had tried to exclude all negroes from the state. Now, as it turned out, negroes came, and sometimes together with whites on Kaiser trains which brought workers to wartime shipyards—but in disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said 84 negros had arrived out of 1160 men. I rode west on a mixed Kaiser-military train. Most of the Kaiser trains were from the South, carrying some poor blacks and more poor whites.