Early Life of Jim
Upbringing
Jim was born in Chicago in the Black middle-class community of Morgan Park. Jim went to the primarily white Morgan Park High School where he played football. He walked onto the football team only after tryouts and luckily was able to get on the team after showing his outstanding grades. Jim and his sister were both first-generation students, he at Dartmouth and she at Stanford University
Jim's Parents: The Significance of African American Pullman Porters in the 1920s
Jim's father, James Hutchinson, Sr. was born in 1896 and mother, Dorothy Hutchinson was born in 1911. His father was a Pullman Porter, hired to work on the railroads as porters on sleeping cars. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Jim was growing up, Pullman Porters were considered middle-class and impacted the Black community.
The most influential Black man in America was the Pullman Porter acording to Larry Tye's Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. His book goes into to detail about the importance of the Pullman Porter. During the 1920s, the Pullman Porter was seen in the Black world as a figure who captured the romance of the railroad, a traveling man with sense and money in his pocket. Pullman Porters were middle-class workers who had an impact on the Black community far more significant than acknowledged. Behind many successful African Americans, there is a Pullman Porter. Porters carried radical music like jazz and blues from big cities to outlying burgs. They brought ideas about freedom and tolerance — often considered seditious by why authorities — from the urban north to the segregated south. When white riders left behind newspapers and magazines, porters picked up bits of news and new ways of doing things. They were determined to provide their children the education that they themselves had been denied.
