His name was Morris Slater, but he was better known as “Railroad Bill.” That’s the kind of name about which they write ballads, the kind of name that starts incredible stories: “Did you hear about Railroad Bill?” That was true for Slater, too. But his legacy as “an outlaw,” that infamous figure who ran up and down the American timeline, is a complex one. Railroad Bill differed from other outlaws because he was Black, and his race—and perceptions of it—intersected with a volatile time in US history. As historian Burgin Mathews explains, Railroad Bill represented a “powerful individual threat to white authority.”
But let’s go back. The legend started somewhere, and for Railroad Bill it began in Alabama around 1893. Slater, as he was still known, was a turpentine still worker. As the story goes, one day he strolled into town with a rifle. He was approached by a policeman and asked to turn over his gun. The request, according to some versions of the story, came because Slater had refused to pay taxes on the gun. There was a struggle. Bullets flew. Slater shot the officer, then fled, escaping either to the swamps or by hopping on a passing freight train. From that day on, he’d be known as Railroad Bill.
As folklorist John W. Roberts explains, the legend of Railroad Bill had all the hallmarks of a classic outlaw/folk hero. The American outlaw is, “seen as a man of the people,” Roberts writes. “Much of his reputation is based on the perception of the outlaw as one who rights wrongs.”
When Bill hopped onto that train and into the folk imagination, Black folklore often portrayed him in such a light. He robbed trains throughout the state, having shootouts and evading capture, and not only did he sell the stolen goods to poor Black people at prices lower than company stores, his acts, though not condoned, were seen as “defiance against the white system and celebration of his ‘badness,’” Roberts writes.
Bill always stayed one step ahead of the police, and these weren’t the times for a Black person to outwit white authority. This was during Reconstruction, and Alabama, like all of the South, “struggled to adjust to a new racial as well as economic order,” according to Mathews. Bill’s crimes only deepened the belief that newly-emancipated Black Americans needed to be controlled. Because of this, the hunt for Railroad Bill extended far past the outlaw himself.