![]() The Negro Motorist Green Book was most popular.īased on the book by historian Gretchen Sorin, the now-streaming PBS documentary “Driving While Black,” highlights the basis for these divergent views of the mythic “American Road” between whites and Blacks. highway system clung to guides to help them simultaneously find rest, relaxation and recreation and to avoid humiliation, peril and murder.īeginning in the 1930’s, Smith’s Tourist Guide, The Bronze American and others were published, attempting to address the unique needs of Black travelers. In the pre-Civil Rights era, Black Americans driving America’s backroads, main streets or its network of 150,000-plus miles of asphalt and concrete that make up the U.S. Driving instead lent itself to a different literary niche, if you will, for Black Americans: the travel guide that burst with caution even as it stoked anticipation. Road novels such as Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” written by white men, embody that spirit of eager abandon.Īmong Black American literary authors, though they’ve been publishing books since the 18th century, there isn’t a tradition of the road novel. Sorin combines impeccable, exhaustive research and personal stories with a seamless elegance, somehow managing to hold the object under examination far enough away to consider it fully and close enough to really inhabit it.America’s literary canon contains a number of books inspired by the potent combination of the automobile, the interstate highway system, and an advertising industry wildly successful at equating cars with status, freedom, virility, rebellion and endless possibility. She writes in a way that academics and laypersons will both admire. Sorin, a professor at State University of New York at Albany, dazzles with plain language. It is the work of a brilliant mind and a beautiful heart. Blacks who traveled, within their town or outside of it, encountered violence and were killed sometimes, as we are today. Blacks could not drive through certain cities or stay past 6 p.m. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels and repair shops often refused service to black customers or mistreated them. After the automobile arrived, in order to stem revenue losses, trains and buses were forced to change racist policies.īut progress invites backlash, and the automobile is no exception. The Montgomery (Ala.) bus boycott worked because folks with cars helped those without cars. Educators and civil rights leaders drove from town to town, promoting their ideas in person.Ĭars served the struggle for civil rights in other ways. Automobiles became a source of and tool for employment: taxi services, hauling jobs, musical gigs in multiple cities. Cars allowed migration to industrializing cities. In a vehicle that you own, you never have to sit in the back or give up your seat to a white passenger. In an automobile, there is no Negroes-only railcar right behind the locomotive, filling up with soot. Sorin begins with compulsory travel during the Middle Passage, considers the limitations on movement enforced during slavery, examines Jim Crow train cars, racism on interstate buses, and back-of-the-bus policies on city buses, all before she gets to cars.įor blacks, cars arrived as a haven. In order to chronicle the history well, as Sorin does, one has to overwhelm. ![]() ![]() If that sounds overwhelming, it is sometimes. Sorin’s book represents millions of miles traveled in millions of shoes over more than 100,000 days. If “walk a mile in my shoes” is a way to invite another person to experience the world as you have, then Gretchen Sorin’s “Driving While Black” - a history of the centuries-long effort to limit and indignify black mobility - is that same concept magnified. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |