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NY Reviw of Books, JULY 23, 2020 ISSUE
Racism on the Road
by Sarah A. Seo
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
by Gretchen Sorin
Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
by Candacy Taylor
Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00
In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport,
Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He
was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim
Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations.
Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well.
Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the
1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that
established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of
state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade
seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America.
Today, two generations later, American society is confronting a carceral
state that Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow.” Abundant
statistics show what is now an undeniable fact: people of color,
especially black people, are overrepresented and treated unequally in
the criminal justice system. According to the most recent Bureau of
Justice Statistics report, blacks make up 33 percent of the prison
population, nearly triple their 12 percent share of the US adult
population. Many more individuals, charged with low-level offenses, may
not be incarcerated but end up in what legal scholar Issa
Kohler-Hausmann calls “misdemeanorland,” where they are subject to
prolonged oversight that requires them to demonstrate good behavior
before a judge will dismiss the charges against them. Unsurprisingly,
this legal purgatory is racially skewed as well.
These disparities in large part reflect unequal law enforcement. In New
York City, for example, blacks are stopped more frequently than whites,
even after one accounts for neighborhood crime rates. In 2013 54 percent
of all police stops were of blacks while 12 percent were of whites (29
percent were of Hispanics). This finding, based on the police
department’s own records, prompted a federal judge to hold the city
liable for its unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy in the 2013 case
Floyd v. City of New York.
In the rest of the country, where driving rather than walking is the
norm, most people’s interactions with the police occur in their cars,
and blacks experience starkly different traffic stops from whites. The
Stanford Open Policing Project has examined data from twenty-one state
patrol agencies and twenty-nine municipal police departments, which
showed that officers stopped black drivers at higher rates than white
drivers. Black people are not only searched more frequently than whites
once they have been pulled over; they are often searched with little or
no cause for suspicion. Even if a cop finds nothing incriminating, a
“routine” traffic stop can still serve as an entry point to the justice
system: a ticket results in fines, fees, and court costs, which, if the
driver cannot afford to pay, will then lead to license suspensions,
arrest warrants, contempt procedures, and, ultimately, jail. The
sequence from traffic ticket to incarceration or even death has ensnared
so many that the movement to defund the police after George Floyd’s
death has prompted demands to remove traffic-law enforcement from police
work in many cities, including Berkeley, Chicago, and Durham.
Contemporary movements against mass incarceration have recast histories
of the civil rights movement, urging scholars to make sense of what
happened to the promise of the Sixties. In Driving While Black: African
American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, Gretchen Sorin examines
the struggle to abolish segregation on the highways and byways in Jim
Crow America. Unlike some of the more familiar narratives—the march from
Selma to Montgomery that culminated in the Voting Rights Act, or Loving
v. Virginia, which invalidated anti-miscegenation laws—the story Sorin
tells does not conclude with a victory but with today’s crisis of mass
incarceration. The open road is where many black Americans have been
unjustly stopped, searched, and arrested—or worse. Still, Sorin
maintains that black drivers and the black businesses that catered to
them were crucial to the fight for equality by resisting restrictions on
their mobility: the automobile paved the “road to civil rights,” as
Sorin suggests in her subtitle. So how did it ultimately lead to unequal
justice?
Journalists started using the phrase “driving while black” to refer to
the racial profiling of black drivers by law enforcement in the 1990s,
around the time that the American Civil Liberties Union proved with
statistical evidence in the 1996 case State v. Soto that New Jersey
state troopers disproportionately stopped minority motorists. In Sorin’s
book, however, the phrase does not refer only to discriminatory traffic
stops. Rather, “driving while black” is an all-encompassing term that
captures the social history of African-Americans on the road as well as
the roadside businesses that were open to them in Jim Crow America.
Modern automotive travel would not have existed without mass-produced
cars, but travel across great distances would not have been possible
without the gas stations, restaurants, and motels along the way, many of
which refused black customers. As Sorin points out, motorists’
experiences varied by race long before the 1990s, and the particular
experiences of black drivers included not only harrowing police
encounters but also the racism of white commerce.
Driving While Black highlights the dangers of such discrimination by
describing the necessities that were denied to black Americans as they
traveled. Vacationing families had to plan ahead, for they could not run
out of gas or need a bathroom break or a place to sleep where local
businesses were likely to turn them away. Many kept a portable toilet
and an extra tank of fuel in the trunk, packed their meals, and slept in
their cars or drove through the night. Those who chose to keep driving
risked falling asleep at the wheel. Treatable injuries from car
accidents could become life-threatening. Because ambulances and
hospitals were segregated, dispatchers often asked about race when they
received an emergency call, knowing that whites-only medical service
providers would deny black patients. In many communities, black funeral
homes came to the rescue, and using a hearse as an ambulance became such
a common solution that some manufacturers like Cadillac offered the
“combination coach,” which had a bed that moved up or down, depending on
whether the person in the back was on a stretcher or in a casket.
Finding a hospital with available beds was another matter entirely, and
too many injured motorists died in search of medical care.
To navigate Jim Crow America, black motorists relied on guidebooks that
listed the establishments that would serve them. These black travel
guides, mostly produced by individual entrepreneurs without much in the
way of resources and staff, never covered the entire country and
initially focused on cities and surrounding areas with large black
populations, such as Chicago and New York City. Over time and with the
help of black travel agents, they were able to expand their scope. By
the 1950s, the most successful guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book,
even devoted issues to international travel. Published from 1936 to 1966
by Victor Hugo Green, a mailman, The Green Book has seen a resurgence of
interest recently with the 2018 Oscar-winning film Green Book (much
criticized for its idealized portrayal of race relations), the
documentary The Green Book: Guide to Freedom (2019), and the current
exhibition Traveling While Black: A Century of Pleasure and Pain and
Pilgrimage at the New York Public Library.
The guide’s wide distribution—circulation hit more than a million copies
a year by the mid-1950s—reflects how eagerly black Americans embraced
the open road and the freedom it represented, in part because
automobility offered an escape from the humiliations of segregated
public transit. But the very existence of guides like The Green Book
also shows how qualified that freedom was for people of color. While
driving one’s own car provided greater mobility for black people, it
also subjected them to a great deal of harassment and danger. Despite
the perils, black families got in their cars, many with a copy of The
Green Book tucked in the glove compartment, to visit relatives across
the South or to explore new attractions that were popping up to satisfy
the demands of automotive travel.
Sorin argues that black motorists should be counted as active
participants in the civil rights movement. “Not every African American
stood on the front lines of a civil rights march or a sit-in,” she
writes, “but many were able to nudge the cause forward by exercising
their freedom of mobility. Resistance could take many forms.” For Sorin,
although the strategies of leisure travelers and protesters may have
been different, their goals were the same. Her argument raises an
intriguing question: Can consumerism count as activism?
Going on a road trip certainly can be seen as defiance against the laws
and norms that restricted the mobility of black Americans, just as
sitting at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s was done in defiance of
segregation. But there is also a significant difference between
patronizing businesses that were open to black people and demanding to
be served at businesses that weren’t. It’s the difference between
seeking equality by adopting the decorum of white society versus
insisting on equality by forcing white society to change its rules.
Sorin alludes to this distinction in her discussion of Green and William
Butler, the publisher of another black guidebook, Travelguide. According
to Sorin, both were gradualists, not radicals, believing that “travel
would ultimately help defeat prejudice” by bringing together people of
difference races. Their plan depended not only on black travelers’
willingness to conform to white bourgeois standards of respectability
but also on their financial ability to do so. The guidebooks accordingly
exhorted readers to demonstrate “their supposedly sophisticated
middle-class demeanor, their worthiness to be granted full access” to
accommodations. Liberal white allies embraced Green and Butler’s
“travel-guide approach” to eventual integration because “it involved
good manners rather than direct confrontation” and so was “among the
least-threatening demands for civil rights.”
Apolitical strategy based on modeling dominant social and cultural
values proved insufficient to combat racism, especially at the
structural level. Some white proprietors may have begun to act
friendlier toward their middle-class black patrons, but without legal
and policy changes, white society steadfastly refused to share access to
good education, jobs, housing, and other privileges. Indeed, those in
charge of The Green Book after its founder’s death in 1960 came to this
very realization; according to Sorin, the last few issues finally
declared “support of the ‘militancy’ of the civil rights organizations.”
By then, more and more black Americans realized that change would not
come by waiting for others to extend equality or by asking judges to
uphold their constitutional rights. They would have to demand equal
rights through direct action, insisting on being served at businesses
that refused them and facing the possibility of arrest and jail time by
flouting Jim Crow laws. By the last chapter of her book, Sorin
recognizes that the polite politics of middle-class respectability were
no match for structural racism, and she backs away slightly from her
argument when she grants that Green “gave too much credit to travel as
the reason for gains in civil rights.”
Still, the consumerism that Green promoted does appear to have
contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, at least in the
aggregate. This federal legislation, which prohibited discrimination at
all establishments, including lodgings and gas stations, clearly
benefited black motorists. Driving While Black also briefly mentions the
1964 test case challenging the new law, though a fuller discussion would
have been pertinent to the question of mobility and civil rights, since
the case centered on the rights of black travelers. In Heart of Atlanta
Motel, Inc. v. United States, a motel owner filed suit in federal court
arguing that the new civil rights law violated his constitutional right
to have his motel “choose its customers and operate its business as it
wishes.” He further claimed that by forcing him to rent rooms to black
guests, Congress subjected him “to involuntary servitude in
contravention of the Thirteenth Amendment.”
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rejected the proprietor’s
claims and ruled that Congress could prohibit racial discrimination
under the Constitution’s commerce clause, which granted the national
legislature the power to regulate commerce “among the several States.”
It agreed with the government that “the unavailability to Negroes of
adequate accommodations interferes significantly with interstate travel”
and, for support, cited congressional hearings that included testimony
from Under Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. The Court
even mentioned that “these conditions had become so acute as to require
the listing of available lodging for Negroes in a special guidebook”—the
guides featured so prominently in Driving While Black. The opinion also
pointed out that the Heart of Atlanta Motel was located near interstate
highways 75 and 85, two major arteries that stretched across much of the
eastern half of the country. It advertised in national magazines and on
over fifty highway billboards, and approximately 75 percent of its
guests were from out of state. A unanimous court concluded that the
motel’s business clearly fell within Congress’s purview of interstate
commerce.
At the same time, the Supreme Court decided a companion case involving a
restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama. Ollie’s Barbeque also refused to
serve black customers, but, unlike Heart of Atlanta Motel, had hardly
any out-of-state patrons. The Court again defended the 1964 act by
maintaining that interstate commerce included businesses that bought and
sold products that had “moved in commerce.” In the twentieth-century US
economy, that meant that federal antidiscrimination laws applied even to
local, mom-and-pop shops. Although compliance was uneven at first, most
white business owners eventually obeyed, in sharp contrast to the
extensive resistance against Brown v. Board of Education’s desegregation
mandate for public schools ten years earlier. The crucial difference was
that integration expanded an establishment’s clientele and bolstered the
bottom line.
Had Driving While Black ended with the Civil Rights Act and Heart of
Atlanta Motel, it would have hewed to traditional narratives of the
civil rights movement, which typically begin with a struggle against
legalized discrimination, climax with nonviolent protest, and conclude
with a legislative or courtroom victory. But a triumphant history that
ends with a hard-won antidiscrimination law would seem naive today,
especially when poverty and injustice exact an uneven toll on people of
color. Instead, Driving While Black jumps to the 1990s and continues to
the present day in its epilogue. The last few pages note the post-1990s
definition of “driving while black”—racial profiling in traffic
stops—and the 1996 ACLU legal challenge against the State of New Jersey;
the 2015 Department of Justice report about the police’s predatory use
of traffic citations against black residents in Ferguson, Missouri; and
the 2017 Post-Racial Negro Green Book, which provides a state-by-state
survey of police brutality.
But even before the 1990s, black motorists experienced disproportionate
abuse by traffic cops and highway patrol. Candacy Taylor’s recently
published Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black
Travel in America (2020) begins with a heartrending story from the
author’s stepfather, Ron. During a family road trip in the South
sometime in the 1950s, a police officer pulled Ron’s family over and
launched an interrogation, demanding to know who they were, who owned
their well-appointed car, and where they were going. Ron’s father calmly
explained that the car was his employer’s, that the woman sitting next
to him in the passenger seat was the employer’s maid, and that Ron was
the maid’s son. Then the officer asked, “Where’s your hat?” After Ron’s
father pointed to a cap hanging in the back-seat area, the officer let
the family go. That chauffeur’s cap, Ron realized, was a lifesaving
prop, “the perfect cover for every middle-class black man pulled over
and harassed by the police.”
Taylor, like Sorin, focuses on the racism of white commerce and
celebrates “black travelers, armed with the Green Book,” who used their
cars as “a formidable tool that pushed the pendulum of equality
forward.” At the same time, because it cannot ignore the current crisis
of over-policing and mass incarceration, Overground Railroad wavers
between commending and qualifying the efforts of black motorists and
businesses. Left unexplained in both Overground Railroad and Driving
While Black is what happened after the midcentury struggle for equal
access to public accommodations. After the promise of the Sixties, how
did American society end the century with racial inequality even more
entrenched, especially in the criminal justice system?
By focusing on the people who pursued equality in their cars and with
their roadside businesses, Sorin and Taylor miss a larger story about
the social and legal changes wrought by the automobile that ultimately
led to the injustices cited at the end of their books, which formal
equality under the law could not possibly have addressed. The mass
production of cars facilitated the development of modern policing, with
individual officers wielding unprecedented power in ways that further
perpetuated systemic racism.
Cars were not just freedom machines; they were also dangerous.
Consequently, they were extensively regulated from their earliest years.
In the 1920s and 1930s, local governments throughout the country
enlarged and professionalized their police forces and expanded the
discretion of individual officers to stop motorists and search their
cars for safety violations and, soon, for contraband as well. Because
most drivers violated traffic laws—at some point, nearly everyone is
guilty of speeding, one of the leading causes of car accidents—the
police came to exercise an inordinate amount of discretionary authority
to decide which cars to pull over and which cars to search. The ubiquity
of traffic violations created nearly limitless pretexts for policing.
Enforcement in the War on Drugs, which increased during the mid-1980s,
institutionalized pretextual traffic stops, which targeted drivers of
color and compounded existing inequality in the justice system.
The broad coalition of activists in the 1960s didn’t follow their civil
rights achievements with a widespread movement to reform policing. While
poor black Americans became mired in the resistance to school
desegregation orders or were struggling for greater welfare benefits
during the 1970s economic downturn, the middle class turned its
attention to the War on Crime amid that decade’s surge in gun violence.
A new politics of respectability emerged, this time extolling drug-free
and crime-free lives.
As legal scholar James Forman Jr. detailed in Locking Up Our Own: Crime
and Punishment in Black America (2017), African-American judges,
prosecutors, mayors, and police chiefs supported tough-on-crime measures
and even pretextual policing to combat rising crime rates and drug
addiction in poor black communities. Of course, black leaders are not
the only ones to blame. Scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Elizabeth
Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Naomi Murakawa, John Pfaff, and Doris
Provine have offered additional explanations, including harsh drug and
anti-crime laws, social welfare programs that allied with the criminal
justice system, and all-too-powerful prosecutors.
Significantly, American constitutional law also played a part by
allowing discriminatory policing. In 1996 a unanimous Supreme Court
approved pretextual traffic stops in Whren v. United States, even
though, the opinion recognized, the practice disproportionately affected
people of color. Technology has only made it easier for officers to
discriminate. Just this past April, the Supreme Court decided 8–1 in
Kansas v. Glover, with Justice Sotomayor alone dissenting, that a patrol
officer can stop a driver based solely on a license-plate check showing
that the vehicle’s registered owner—who may or may not be the driver—has
a revoked driver’s license. This decision essentially allows officers to
go fishing. A quick search of the license-registration database accessed
from their patrol car’s mobile data terminal might turn up a suspended
or revoked license, as in Glover, or even an outstanding warrant for
unpaid traffic tickets, which would also provide justification for a
stop and could lead to more intrusive policing.
Antidiscrimination laws certainly made a difference to many black
Americans, among them Sam Cooke, who sang for equal dignity as a citizen
and human being. But the centuries of suffering and struggling against
racism, and the way it has nonetheless persisted in new and evolving
forms, are palpable in today’s ongoing protests. Understanding the
history of the racist policing we see today is necessary to move
forward. One place to start is to understand how the combination of
crime control and traffic-law enforcement conferred tremendous power to
the police in our car-dependent country, where traffic stops are the
most common police encounter. A logical reform, informed by this
history, is to revoke that power. It would have saved Philando Castile,
Sandra Bland, and countless other black lives.
_________________________________________________________
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