Traveling Black
A Story of Race and Resistance
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- 33,99 €
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- 33,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Prize
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award
Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award
A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year
“This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation…Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
“In Mia Bay’s superb history of mobility and resistance, the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
“Traveling Black is well worth the fare. Indeed, it is certain to become the new standard on this important, and too often forgotten, history.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road
From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought to move freely around the United States. But why this focus on Black mobility? From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape in America and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them.
Mia Bay rescues forgotten stories of passengers who made it home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. She shows that Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations, documenting a sustained fight for redress that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A riveting, character-rich account of the rise and fall of racial segregation, it reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws—and why free movement has been at the heart of the quest for racial justice ever since.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Bay (To Tell the Truth Freely) delivers a comprehensive survey of the relationship between travel restrictions, racial segregation, and civil rights in America. According to Bay, travel segregation began in the antebellum North, where free Black passengers were made to ride on the outside of stagecoaches and steamboats. After emancipation, Southern states passed laws requiring separate accommodations for Black and white travelers. Even when Black train passengers paid first-class ticket fares, Bay notes, they were relegated to dirty smoker cars. Automobiles offered more comfort and privacy for long-distance trips, but Black drivers could not depend on reliable access to service stations, food, or lodging. Some early airlines, meanwhile, refused Black passengers altogether. When buses emerged as the most accessible mode of intercity and interstate public transit in the 1930s and '40s, they also became the focus of civil rights activism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the legal framework that would eventually desegregate common carriers and public accommodations, but Bay argues that Black travelers still experience danger and discrimination in the form of higher prices for car insurance, less-reliable public transportation, and racial profiling by law enforcement. Though somewhat dry, this meticulous account proves that "Black mobility an enduring focal point of struggles over equality and difference."
