BOOKS OF THE TIMES <https://www.nytimes.com/column/books-of-the-times>
‘Traveling Black,’ a Look at the Civil Rights Movement in Motion
ByJennifer Szalai <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-szalai>
* NYT, March 24, 2021
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In 1926, while traveling by train from Wilmington, N.C., to Richmond,
Va., the Jamaican-American writer J.A. Rogers was forced to ride in the
wooden Jim Crow car, which was typically placed toward the front, behind
the engine and ahead of the steel cars reserved for white passengers.
//
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
By Mia Bay
Illustrated. 391 pages.
The Belknap Press of Harvard University. $35.
“This, by the way, is the only instance in the South where the Black man
goes first,” Rogers wrote in a wry aside. “Going first” in this case
meant that the Jim Crow car served as a buffer for white passengers —
from the soot and smoke that billowed out from the locomotive, or from
the impact of a crash, when the wooden car’s rickety construction would
be “crushed to tinder.”
In “Traveling Black,” 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. “Most studies of segregation are
centered largely on the South, and are more grounded in the history of
particular communities than in the experiences of Black people in
motion,” Bay writes. “Once one of the most resented forms of
segregation, travel segregation is now one of the most forgotten.”
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Recent books
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/books/review/driving-while-black-gretchen-sorin-overground-railroad-candacy-taylor.html>by
Candacy Taylor and Gretchen Sorin have explored the role of the car in
Black American life, and though the automobile figures prominently in
“Traveling Black,” Bay situates it in the broader context of the various
forms that mobility took after emancipation. Starting with trains, she
turns to cars, buses and planes in successive chapters; each technology
was initially embraced by Black travelers for its potential to offer an
escape from the degradation and dangers of the Jim Crow car, only to
succumb to the stubborn forces of segregation.
ImageA Black airman from New York City at the segregated Terminal
Station in Atlanta, 1956.
A Black airman from New York City at the segregated Terminal Station in
Atlanta, 1956.Credit...William J. Smith/Associated Press, via Shutterstock
In the notorious case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court gave
legal sanction to Jim Crow, establishing the doctrine of “separate but
equal”; Bay traces the arc from Plessy in 1896 to the Freedom Rides of
1961, when volunteers traveled on buses through the South to test the
enforcement of another Supreme Court decision, from 1960, which decreed
that interstate passengers should be served “without discrimination.”
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Bay, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose previous books
include a biography of Ida B. Wells, is an elegant storyteller, laying
out the stark stakes at every turn while also showing how discrimination
wasn’t just a matter of crushing predictability but often, and more
insidiously, a haphazard jumble of risks.
Uncertainty and confusion turned out to be “defining difficulties” for
travelers, as generations of Black Americans tried to navigate a
patchwork of segregationist laws and customs that varied wildly, not
just from state to state but often at the discretion of a particular
ticket collector or railway conductor. Black motorists couldn’t be sure
if they would find a safe place to stop, an ambiguity that turned out to
be more pronounced in the North, where a lack of segregation signs meant
that whatever “rules” existed were unspoken and unclear. As one article
put it, “You could never know where insult and embarrassment are waiting
for you.”
For those white people who meted it out, humiliation appeared to be both
a means and a destination — a tactic for circumscribing Black people’s
freedom of movement, and a cruel objective in its own right. Before the
Civil War, strict segregation didn’t make much sense in the South, where
white enslavers traveled with the Black people they enslaved. That
changed with emancipation, when public space became contested terrain.
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Bay describes companies going out of their way to cater to the
hair-trigger sensitivities of some white passengers. Apparently not
satisfied with relegating Black people to the back of the bus, Georgia
and South Carolina tested seating arrangements that forced
African-Americans to ride facing backward. (The experiment was nixed
because it caused motion sickness.) In the era of air travel, planes
stopping to refuel in the South would let the white passengers off so
that they could eat lunch in the segregated airport, while Black
passengers, barred from eating at the terminal restaurant, had to stay
on the tarmac.
Image
Mia Bay, whose new book is “Traveling Black: A Story of Race and
Resistance.”
Mia Bay, whose new book is “Traveling Black: A Story of Race and
Resistance.”Credit...Schell Photography
Sometimes discrimination was strategized in secret, behind the scenes.
Employees for American Airlines were supposed to affix a special code to
reservations for Black fliers, making it easier to segregate passengers
on flights and give preference to white passengers on waiting lists.
(Responding to a 1951 lawsuit, American Airlines denied the practice of
any discrimination, insisting that “some of our best employees are
Negroes.”)
Bay’s narration of all this is seamless, skillfully recounting the
granular details while offering judicious glimpses of the bigger
picture. While ending formal travel segregation was an undeniable
achievement, the methods and motives for doing so were often more
pragmatic than pure. President John F. Kennedy’s special deputy for
civil rights used the bland language of the interstate commerce clause
to argue that discrimination in public accommodations was unconstitutional.
And it wasn’t simply a matter of white government officials realizing
that racist strictures were morally indefensible; they were also feeling
the pressures of the Cold War. For a country that was trying to persuade
the leaders of newly decolonized African countries that the American
system was superior to Soviet Communism, Jim Crow was an abject
embarrassment.
“Traveling Black” ends with an epilogue on the contemporary reality of
underfunded public transit, racial profiling and fatal traffic stops. In
2017, the N.A.A.C.P. took what Bay calls “the unprecedented step” of
issuing atravel advisory
<https://www.naacp.org/latest/travel-advisory-state-missouri/>urging
Black motorists to exercise “extreme caution” when driving in the state
of Missouri. Her excellent book deepens our understanding of not just
where we are but how we got here.
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