Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

by Mia Bay

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Travel, American History, African American, Social Justice

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2021

About the author

Mia Bay is an American historian and currently the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a professor of history at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. A 2010 Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellow and 2009 National Humanities Fellow, she is the author of two books on African American history and a biographer of Ida B. Wells entitled To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells.

Reviews

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a transfixing examination of the history of transportation in America. Particularly, the history of racism in transportation—it really is white supremacy all the way down, isn't it?—and the design baked within various modes of transportation to keep Black Americans "in their place."

Traveling Black is also a story of resistance, of pushing for equality and equity. For freedom in mobility and movement, and the freedoms gained by the ability to move.

It goes beyond the story of the Green Book, tackling rail, car, air and public transportation like busses and subway systems.

Traveling Black is still highly applicable today, although the ways of oppression are often hidden a lot further. And the shifting away from public transportation toward individual and privatized systems is only highlighting and strengthening that subtle and insidious segregation.

[Quinetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learned so many new things from reading this book. I knew Jim Crow was involved in many of the different modes of transportation, but it was enlightening to see just how it was twisted and utilized to make traveling so much more difficult for black people. Highly recommended for anyone who may be interested in this subject.

[reading.withree · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ A masterpiece of scholarly and human insight, this book helps explain why the long, unfinished journey to racial equality so often takes place on the road.”
•••••
Traveling Black tells a story of individuals who traveled during Jim Crow. Segregated cars, segregated planes, rides in the back of the bus, train and discriminatory travel policies. A character driven account of many humiliations experienced by Black Travelers as well as those who fought for the right to travel freely.
•••••
Wow. As someone who loves to travel, I was seriously taken back by this book. Not in a bad way, but simply just disgusted by what black people endured. Stories of individuals who made it back home despite being discriminated against, rerouted, ignored, insulted and stranded. Traveling black upends our understanding of black resistance, with documentation of a constant fight that falls outside of the civil rights movement.

[Matangi]

dnf page 31. in my opinion, this book was in dire need of an editor. by page 31, the author had repeated the same information about how the car that black people were relegated to during jim crow was often behind the engine because that’s where there would be the most soot.

i skimmed and looked at all the pictures and found out that american racism severely embarrassed us in front of visiting african dignitaries in the 60s because they would be refused to be served in restaurants on their drives from new york to dc.

i tried so hard to read this book. i got it on ebook, audiobook, AND print. sorry, i’m giving up now.

[Jerry Gershenhorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful indictment of the racist history of the horrific treatment of African Americans when they traveled by rail, streetcar, bus, auto, and airplane. It also beautifully documents the long fight by Black travelers to gain equal and integrated access to all forms of transportation. And Bay brings the story up to the present, when racist treatment of African Americans continues. Blacks pay more for cars, more for auto insurance, and are subject to traffic stops and searches of their cars at a significantly higher rate than are whites. Highly recommended for all Americans, especially whites who doubt the pervasiveness of racist treatment of Black Americans, in the past as well as in the 21st century.

[Melody]

The entire text is well researched and recontextualizes a lot of the ways we think about modern transportation or lack thereof, but the epilogue was particularly eye opening, adding layers to the way I think about everything from public restrooms to Hurricane Katrina.

[Sterling Hardaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly thorough history of Jim Crow and systematic racism in America in the 20th century through the lens of travel —buses, plains, trains, and automobiles.

If you’re casually familiar with Plessy v Ferguson, the Freedom Riders, Montgomery Bus Boycotts and so forth, you know the headlines, but Bay does an exceptional job of telling the deeper policy and people stories behind those and more by mode of transit.

If you’re interested in the intersection of transit and race and the embarrassingly stupid wastes of time and money we’ve spent restricting Black people in motion for the past 150 years, this one is for you.

[Beverly Hallfrisch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly informative. Unfortunately in conflict with my attention span this often reads like a textbook that is trying not to be a textbook and fails. I find reference to case law to be highly boring.

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance by Mia Bay is an amazing book. I learned much and I have been reading and teaching about discrimination for years. By looking at all the ways African Americans traveled in the era before the Civil Right Act, and afterward, as the territory is still not safe, we can see the nature of the legal barriers, and the years of struggle on the railroads and other roads.

The Jim Crow car was hated by everyone. However, I did not realize the difficulties African Americans had getting tickets on Pullman cars. I can see why musicians like Duke Ellington would ask their managers lease Pullman Cars for travel, since as an individual there was no guarantee, you could get a ticket. Traveling was complex and your first-class ticket could ignore if the conductor had other ideas. Some people were put on Jim Crow cars long before they crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The resistance is honorable, but people should not have been put through such experiences.
Reading Stephanie Capperell’s The Real Pepsi Challenge, one sees how the African American market team for Pepsi faced challenges traveling and securing lodging and meals in the South, even though they were worked for a major corporation. Bay’s book helped me put those difficulties in perspective. This was the norm and why some of the marketing team, even though well paid, were ready to leave working in the South.

The automobile gives people more autonomy and freedom from Jim Crow cars was they travel, but the road had other obstacles. Bay is good in balancing the advantages and the ways that traveling put people in hazardous territories. Again, we see the resistance, the ways that people coped but also developed support networks. People who did travel, shared experiences and help other navigate this difficult territory. We know about the Green Book, but levels of resistance speak to the strength of the community, but we also realize that many people lost.

Telling the story of bus travel, but local and interstate is much needed. The Interstate Commerce Commission is important in challenging practices, but they are not always successful. Yet, it is the language of interstate commerce that is the foundation of the accommodations section of the Civil Right Act. Growing up in the North, I never road a bus in the South, but it was an ordeal. People I knew who grew up in the South, were instructed to walk rather than ride the bus. The level of humiliation gives one pause and as much as people protested the NACCP made education a priority.

The Journey of Reconciliation begins the challenges in 1947, but the method is picked up in 1961 with CORE. Farmer’s letters of the plans were ignored, but once the burning of buses happened, the Freedom Rides making front page news pushed everyone, including the Kennedys to make it a priority since it was the Cold War. People volunteered to keep the buses going. It was hard to sell America as a nation of liberty. Diplomats were denied services, but the nation had to face the reality of daily insults that Americans experienced. I learned much from her chapters on buses, especially the non-violent protests.

Air travel was new but followed similar patterns even the structure of airports with segregated waiting rooms, dining areas and so forth. You have national companies operating out of local airports, so there are territorial disputes. Federal Aviation Act of 1958 required carriers to treat people equally, but the problems were with the airports. Again, interstate travel is the route to change, but not businesses were ready to cooperate. There is also a struggle for jobs, as many did not believe that African Americans could master this technology.

Driving while Black, traveling while Black, shopping while Black, etc. are still areas of trouble, but this book puts many issues in perspective. We can understand the decline of public transportation as the nation supports highways and diverts funding from public transportation. We are now watching bus lines disappear and our railroad connections are a fraction of what they once were. Bia’s book can open people’s eyes to other alternatives.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the work Candacy A. Taylor (perhaps) meant to write in her book, Overground Railroad, but failed to do. It is a solidly researched and smoothly written accounting of the myriad of pains American Blacks have suffered in merely traveling across the country. Trains, buses, cars, planes, and all the associated entities connected with them: passenger terminals, gas stations, lodging, eating, etc. It joins my personal Pantheon of best histories on the Black experience in the United States. In this case, the focus is transportation. It joins Ari Berman's book, Give Us the Ballot, and Carol Anderson's book, One Person, No Vote, on voting rights, Richard Rothstein's book, The Color of Law, on housing, Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery By Another Name, and Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, on incarceration, Danielle L. McGuire's book, At the Dark End of the Street, on women, and Phillip Dray's book, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, on lynchings. There are many fine histories out there besides these, but any reader, especially one who is not Black, or who is too young to have experienced what others may have gone through before them, would be far ahead of the average American, by reading these books, in understanding the massive obstacles that one set of Americans have put in Black America's way over the decades. As a side note about this particular book, besides the overwhelming and damaging biases displayed in this book, one reaction I had while reading it was how often the discrimination never even managed to go beyond simply petty nonsense, a desperate clinging to some vestige of superiority, like something an immature school kid would do to another classmate in spite, but, in these lesser cases, it was government officials and business leaders being the spoiled children, acting out. In short, at best, they never even rise past being really pathetic. Read this book and the others quickly before your state or local government bans them all, and burns them on the street in front of your house.

[Chrissy's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely fantastic insightful and riveting read.

You will learn a lot about segregation in travel during the Jim Crow era, you will learn about the first black pilots and aviation within the African American race, which is something I knew very little about, and all about world records and achievements in aviation, you will also learn why you hardly saw any black pilots back in that day and age. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about what it was like for black people to travel across the united states during the Jim Crow era up until today.

This is a great book for students who are studying a similar topic to the resistance during the civil rights era. I will add that this book is a fantastic read for this year's Black History Month theme of 'Black Resistance'. It questions if black people will ever truly be free in their own country. I loved every single chapter and I would highly recommend it.

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[Benedict · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comprehensive history of racial segregation and discrimination in regards to traveling within the United States, from the abolishment of slavery to now.

This book systematically progresses through time by method of transportation, starting with trains, to cars, buses and planes. We start with the Jim Crow carriages in railways soon after the emancipation of black people in the 1800s, to now, where black people are still more likely to be stopped and searched in traffic stops (and, not to put too fine a point on it, are still likely to be shot by police for no reason).

Its interesting to hear how systemic racism would be defended by discriminatory laws, and black people have had to fight for basic dignity and freedoms since they were released from servitude. Its disappointing to hear that racist attitudes in transportation services continue essentially until it becomes too internationally embarrassing to maintain; you cant fight an ideological war against communism when your own country has such blatant disregard for a subset of its citizenry.

The content is good, though I found the writing style grating at times. It repeats its intent to explain things, in a very "in this essay I will..." style that feels a bit juvenile, and was very immersion breaking when listening on audiobook.

But good content. Essential history.

[CJ Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started reading this one thinking it was initially a different book, and I am glad that I did.

This book was extremely informative and does a great job highlighting the struggles it took to obtain desegregation in the US; It is rather frightening to thinking it was not that long ago. It also illustrates that what we were taught in school barely scratches the surface of what people went through. Also, it shows that it was decades in the making to get to the point of the freedom rides and Rosa Parks, and that she was not the first person to stand up to segregation by refusing to give up her seat, and that it heralds back to the pullman cars of the railroads.

I thought it was well thought out and clear. The only real issue I had with the book was the lack of linearity in the story telling which isn't really a problem, just something that can't be avoided for a book of this nature and what it is attempting to do. Although I do understand that it would be hard to be linear as numerous things would be developing at one time, and it would be hard to focuses on all of them at once.

Overall, I thought this was a good book and I would recommend it to others, especially those interested in American history.

[Amanda Irving · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was, hands down, a phenomenal book by the author! I learned a lot of insightful stuff about the Jim Crow era. Transportation segregation and discrimination are another crucial layer of the Civil Rights movement era. I never knew the extent to which Blacks endured such horrific and denigrating treatment from Whites and the system as a whole. During every single transportation innovation stage, discrimination seemed to follow Blacks around like a horrible stench that won't go away because it's overt and insidious.

Overall, I rate this book a 10/10. The author approached the book with such nuance and vivid details. She did a phenomenal job of interspersing anecdotes while framing the Jim Crow era within a broader historical context. It helps to humanize people's experiences rather than just simply reading the cold, hard facts about Jim Crow or any other historical period, for that matter.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cried when I read the part about the three decades of "Jim Crow Accidents." Imagine how much it must hurt and how much it must piss someone off to know your ancestors were thought so little of and just dismissed as worthless? After slavery ended, black people were thought of so little they were barely considered second class citizens.
This book contains lots of interesting information, but it is a slog to get through. The author repeats the same facts and information and often refers to the same story several times. This book could have been a lot shorter and still have the same impact.
I got to page 140 before calling it quits. I will try again or just read the first few pages of each chapter to get the necessary information.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mia Bay does a great job looking at the experience of Blacks as they attempted to travel the country. By looking across various eras and forms of transit, Bay is able to highlight similarities in the types of discrimination that Whites created and the ways Blacks resisted these restrictions and created spaces they could control. One thing that I hope Bay's book will contribute is to remind readers that Jim Crow was more than an inconvenience of back doors, inferior water fountains or social insults. It was a matter of life and death, as Jim Crow crashes on trains attest.

This is a well-written book that, while scholarly and drawing on a wide variety of sources, is accessible to a general audience as well.

[Anjie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of the long and ongoing struggles faced traveling while Black. I thought I knew the broad strokes of the bus boycotts and the Jim Crow South’s impact on transportation and public access to hotels & restaurants— I wasn’t even close. This book dives deep but doesn’t overwhelm. Also name-checks several brave, ordinary people who were tired of being disrespected, ignored, beaten or worse just because they wanted to get to work or vacations or funerals, report for military service or return home from war for other people’s freedom.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive study of racial prejudice in all modes of travel from the 1800's to the current day. The history of blacks protesting mistreatment while traveling goes away back from the bus boycotts of the 60's. Eye-opening and disturbing at the extent of the discrimination, even in flying. I found the book a bit tedious at times because of the legal details of case and case. A worthwhile, if long, read the.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding and thoroughly researched history of segregation in American transportation. Sadly, while the country has addressed it through legislation, the problem of racism is embedded in the system to this day resulting in traffic stops of Blacks for minor equipment violations, racial profiling for drug interdictions, higher insurance rates, price gouging for cars etc. While you knew the racism is ubiquitous, the book is still eye opening.

[Ecpagnew · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a while the book seemed repetitive but perhaps that was the point. Denied equal access on busses, on trains, on planes. Examples of being required to wait for tickets, to board, to sit where the ticket purchased was supposed to provide. In the epilogue there are a few current day examples provided but in many ways was a let down in the claims only supported by general mentions without many facts provided.

[Michael B. Silverson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astounding, sobering and absolutely eye-opening read. My head is spinning not just at the scope of senseless and shameful policies of segregation and discrimination in this country, but at the winding, tireless legal and grassroots journey to justice, though modern challenges remain. It reads like a legal thriller because it is one.

[Catelin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so informative. Though I really am quite fond of novels, I could barely put this one down. As a 28 year old, white woman in the US, let me tell you I was shocked and appalled that many of the things discussed in this book I had never even heard mentioned once.

So informative. Highly recommend.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
By Mia Bay
2021

An in depth history of how African Americans traveled in the United States since the end of slavery. Areas focused on are trains, automobiles, buses, and airplanes, and the facilities associated with them.
Soooooo much information. I knew some of the history, but had no idea about other bits.
4 stars.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written, organized, extremely well-documented — I'm impressed with Mia Bay's detective work in piecing together individual stories and bringing together a massive amount of sources to create her narrative.

[Arianna Mears · Rating 5 out of 5]

The content of this book was deeply moving. But I personally didn't jive with the writing style, so it took me a long time to finish. However, Mia Bay has done an interview twice with my employer and her verbal storytelling is so powerful.

[Megara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic study for anyone looking to educate themselves on how modern day racist acts like the murders of innocent Black people during traffic stops is rooted in history. This should be required reading for anyone who is working to become anti-racist.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history of Black mobility and the importance of transportation in freedom, both instrumentally and instrumentally in order to attain other rights. Will likely use this book in teaching in the future.

[Jacki Bowker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and informative, but a lot of information to listen to at once. I liked how the chapters were divided into different modes of transportation. It’s sad and disgusting what was done legally through Jim Crow laws and still continues in so many ways illegally.

[Natalie Lohr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a comprehensive expansion on the intricacies, injustices, inconsistencies of a complicated time period. Travel discrimination usually is bookended by Plessy v. Ferguson and the 1960s, when in reality the fight and the struggles were ever-changing all throughout. Reminds us all how recently the right to freely travel for ALL Americans actually came to happen (within my parent’s lifetimes), and how it never really ended. I saw lots of throughlines with “How to Kill A City.” Bay’s work brings together a large swath of legal history I never knew about as well as countless first person accounts that made me angry, sad, ashamed, grief, lots of things!

[Robyn Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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