Gretchen Sorin - Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

African American Travel and
the Road to Civil Rights

Gretchen Sorin

For

Alvenia Wooten Sullivan

(19192009)

and

Clyde Eugene Sullivan

(19091983)

Strivers, Nurturers, Storytellers

And for Gary (19541992), with whom

I shared a childhood

Good roads beckon to you and me, daily we grow more motor-wise. The nomad in the poorest and the mightiest of us, sends us behind the wheel, north, south, east, and west, in answer to the call of the road.... [T]here is still a small cloud that stands between us and complete motor-travel freedom. On the trail, this cloud rarely troubles us in the mornings, but as the afternoon wears on it casts a shadow of apprehension on our hearts and sours us a little. Where, it asks us, will you stay tonight?

Alfred Edgar Smith,
Through the Windshield, Opportunity, 1933

We obtained the most important book needed for Negroes who traveled anywhere in the United States. It was called the Green Book. The Green Book was the bible of every Negro highway traveler in the 1950s and early 1960s. You literally didnt dare leave home without it.

Earl Hutchinson Sr.,
A Colored Mans Journey Through 20th Century Segregated America

S INCE THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, no feature of modern life has been more emblematic of, or deeply connected to, American identity and the American dream than the automobile. The automobile dramatically changed life in the United States, a subject documented extensively in both popular culture and scholarly works of social, economic, and cultural history. Cars altered the physical landscape of the nation and transformed its culture. As large numbers of Americans moved from the cities to the suburbs, they used their cars to commute to work. Highways traversed and connected cities but bypassed many rural communities, often leaving them in difficult economic circumstances. The national economy flourished with the factory production of automobiles, car parts, and tires. Automobile workers were among those who joined the ranks of the middle class and purchased cars of their own. Anyone who could buy a car could usually also afford leisure travel, and cars took families on vacations, expanding tourism to become one of the nations largest industries. As women became car buyers and drivers, their lives changed as well, giving them more independence. Cars even changed courtship patterns, as the backseat provided opportunities for teenage sexual encounters. Automobiles enabled people and goods to move through the country rapidly and increased interconnectedness across a vast nation, while at the same time creating a new pastimedriving.

Not everyone, however, celebrated the automobile. Over the decades, and even into the present, many commentators argued that it was an atomizing forcenot to mention one causing widespread environmental harm and loss of life through traffic accidents. Still, the dominant view of the car was as a symbol of freedom, independence, and possibility. Yet those who celebrated the automobile and the ideal of the open road, in most cases, wittingly or not, limited their perspective to white Americans.

For African Americans, the automobile held distinct importance and promise. It made self-directed travel a possibility when travel by bus and train, controlled by others, could lead to humiliating or even life-threatening encounters. Owning a car demonstrated black American success in a nation where that success was often thwarted. With a growing black middle class, more and more black Americans could purchase automobiles, and they used their cars and their consumer dollars not merely to vacationthough they did do thatbut also as weapons against segregation. Even many who were not in the middle class found ways to buy cars, seeking any alternative to public transportation, since they were often barred, by law and custom, from securing mortgages and buying houses. Still, each car trip could be fraught with anxiety, and it required special preparations and careful planning to ensure success.

This is one of the first books to tell the story of the African American experience with the automobile, and my hope is that it shows how access to cars completely transformed black life in ways that were both far-reaching and totally unexpected. The automobile expanded the freedom of movement and the opportunity to travel throughout the country for all Americans, but this freedom meant something differentand often, simply moreto blacks than to whites. Automobiles provided a means of escape from the Jim Crow South. They were a tremendous source of pride for African Americans and they changed the etiquette of travel on the road. Most important, the automobile became a tool in the battle to end discrimination in public accommodations.

From the founding of the republic, the right to move about without restrictions and at will was considered fundamental to basic civil rights and American democracy. In the twentieth century, in the 1920 case of United States v. Wheeler, the Supreme Court affirmed the entitlement of every person to move freely from place to place and state to state, a right denied to African Americans:... and the people of each State shall have free ingress and egress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same.

For black people, mobility was always most highly prized because it was often and had historically been an impossibility. Masters confined their enslaved persons to their property, and free black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned to determine their status, and sometimes even kidnapped and sold into slavery. These restrictions on movement before emancipation carried on, in different forms, into the postCivil War Reconstruction era and beyond, despite passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, designed to end slavery and protect the due-process and citizenship rights of African Americans.

For much of the twentieth century, many white Americans felt comfortable denying their black countrymen not only the right to travel freely but also the ability to use public accommodationseverything from swimming pools to restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels. Black Americans attempting to exercise their rights as citizens faced Jim Crow railroad cars and buses, segregated taxicabs and water fountains, even separate sections in public libraries. A tradition of deeply entrenched racismincluding baseless fears about black men being dangerous, and the idea that all black people were naturally inferiorfed beliefs that African Americans should be literally kept in their places and restricted to segregated neighborhoods. The physical separation of black people from the white population excluded African Americans from quality education, housing, and employment, and also reinforced notions of white superiority. But the automobile made it more difficult, although not impossible, to enforce racial apartheid while cruising along the highways at forty-five miles per hour.

The growth of an automobile culture changed the physical environment as well and made reliable roads essential. Narrow carriage paths of mud or hard-packed dirt and meandering cowpaths needed to be replaced with macadamized highways and concrete streets. These old thoroughfares suited a culture that had moved slowly behind horse-drawn vehicles, but automobiles became stuck in these rutted roads, and the dust stirred up on unpaved surfaces clogged internal-combustion engines. Cars required smooth surfaces and at least two lanes wide, enough to accommodate vehicles traveling in opposite directions. And, to keep drivers from getting lost, planners needed to establish national and statewide systems of route numbers.