Traveling Black: Week 8

Traveling Black -- Bay Introduction “Many Black travelers shared Bowler’s concerns—whether or not they chose to wear dirty overalls and carry stoves. African Americans loathed segregated streetcars and railway compartments more than virtually any other form of segregation. ” (6) “American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom. Travel segregation began on the stagecoaches and steamships of the Northeast—the nation’s earliest common carriers—and moved from there to railroads, train stations, restaurants, roadside rest stops, and gas station restrooms, all of which were eventually segregated by law in the South. As new modes of transportation and accommodations developed, new forms of segregation followed.” (7) “I explore the intertwined history of travel segregation and Black struggles for freedom of movement in America from the antebellum era to the present day … “The history of travel is a critical but often overlooked aspect of the Black experience in America.” (7) “We associate Jim Crow cars and buses with the South, but travel segregation was never neatly confined to one region of the country. An artifact of emancipation, it took shape alongside the abolition of slavery, arriving first in the northern states that abolished slavery in the wake of the American Revolution.” (7) “Segregationist practices were inconsistent even in the South. Jim Crow laws were largely similar across the region, and “white” and “colored” signs divided many facilities by race. But there, as Prattis noted, Black travelers navigated a landscape made mystifying by any number of “contrary and confusing customs.” (9) “The doubts faced by Black travelers were not just about protocol. They were also about safety. As Rowan’s experience reminds us, traveling Black could involve greater dangers than simply being refused service. African American drivers have always attracted undue attention from the police, so traffic stops were one great fear. But travel of all kinds held danger. In the South especially, African Americans who breached segregation’s codes, knowingly or unknowingly, could be subject to violence. As some of the travel experiences featured in this book will show, taking the wrong seat got many travelers beaten, and some killed.” (10) “Although privileged in other ways, elite Blacks were often even more familiar with travel discrimination than their poorer counterparts. Affluent enough to be early adopters of new travel technology, they began riding railroads, buses, and planes, and buying cars well before the Black masses could easily afford to do so, and were sometimes all the more unwelcome as a result. The use of prestigious modes of transportation by affluent African Americans could be galling to whites, who resented sharing all but the rudest public accommodations with Blacks on equal terms.” (10) “In the end, no class of Negroes could fully escape traveling Black: it was a formative part of life for wealthy Blacks, poor Blacks, and everyone in between” (10) 1 “Traveling Black tells a story that is both old and new. Travel and transportation are central to the study of the segregation era, which is generally bookmarked on one end by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—a railroad case in which the US Supreme Court gave sanction to de jure segregation—and on the other end by the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other protests designed to end segregation in transportation. Yet Plessy is better remembered today for establishing the doctrine of “separate but equal” than it is for sanctioning Jim Crow cars.” (12) “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides are almost never discussed as the culmination of a long and sustained history of Black protest against segregated transportation. 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. Once one of the most resented forms of segregation, travel segregation is now one of the most forgotten. And yet it is no accident that so many flashpoints of the civil rights movement took place on buses.” (12) “As the history of Black resistance to segregated transportation underscores, Plessy was not the last word on the subject. The Plessy decision upheld a Louisiana law mandating separate but equal accommodations for Blacks and whites on intrastate railroads; it did not provide decisive support for segregation on interstate trains, or require railroads that traveled through several states to honor out-of-state segregation laws. It also posed no legal obstacle to suits challenging the equality of segregated accommodations. Accordingly, both before and after Plessy, African American travelers navigated an interlinked national railway system in which the boundaries and character of separate but equal accommodations were not clearly defined. Black passengers in the South often traveled Jim Crow even when traveling interstate, but they were not always required to do so. Segregationist practices were never entirely consistent from state to state.37 Nor were they legally unassailable.” (14) “In Traveling Black, I tell the story of that movement from its beginnings through the early 1960s, when a new generation of civil rights leaders finally forced the federal government to take decisive action to end segregation on interstate buses and trains and to bar Jim Crow roadside accommodations. I recount that momentous victory, and also note its limits. I have written this book at a time when Black drivers face rampant racial profiling, which sometimes turns lethal, and intercity public transportation has declined to the point that most of the bus lines and railroads African Americans fought so hard to desegregate no longer exist. I close the book with an exploration of how and why African Americans are still traveling Black.” (14) Train, car, bus, plane, Chapter 6: Traveling for Civil Rights “Yet the desegregation of the South’s buses and other common carriers would not be achieved by any single legal victory or heroic act of resistance. It would require a long series of lawsuits challenging segregation on buses, trains, and even airplanes, as well as discrimination in dining cars, bus terminals, railroad station waiting rooms, railway dining cars, airports, hotels, roadside restaurants, and other travel accommodations.” (151) “Although largely fruitless in the short term, the Morgan case and other Black challenges to Jim Crow laid the groundwork for the desegregation of southern transportation by exposing blatant injustices that the South’s many segregation statutes imposed on African American travelers, and seeking federal support for their abolition.” (151) 2 “Irene Morgan is sometimes hailed as the “first Freedom Rider,” but she was not the first African American plaintiff to win a transportation discrimination case in the US Supreme Court. Her victory came on the heels of Mitchell v. United States (1941).” (151) “Once in office, Wergs Mitchell developed an acrimonious relationship with the NAACP’s leaders, who found him an undependable ally. In 1935, not long after he was first elected, he derailed their attempt to get Congress to consider a strong anti-lynching bill by introducing a far weaker bill of his own.” (153) “In taking on the exclusion of Blacks from first-class railroad accommodations, Mitchell addressed an issue that had become a pressing personal problem for him once he was elected to Congress. Like most Blacks, he had trouble securing Pullman accommodations—and he was frustrated to find that his congressional status did not improve matters. In the years leading up to his case, he had even used his status as a member of Congress to see “special identification” allowing him Pullman car privileges on a couple of railroads he used regularly.” (154) “Accordingly, Mitchell’s testimony and legal briefs drew a stark contrast between the “poorly ventilated, filthy” Jim Crow car in which he had been forced to ride, and the first-class accommodations that the Rock Island offered to whites who paid exactly the same fare.” (154) “Narrowly worded, the Mitchell decision posed no direct threat to the railroad’s use of Jim Crow cars for coachclass travel. It held only that Blacks who purchased first-class tickets had a right to “accommodations equal in comforts and conveniences to those afforded to first-class white passengers.” Still, it was widely hailed by Black newspapers (and some white ones) as a decisive victory in the battle against travel segregation. “Jim Crow Car Gets a Death Knell” was the headline in the Detroit Plaindealer; the Pittsburgh Courier ran the headline “High Court Upholds Mitchell: Present Type of Jim-Crow Coaches Doomed.” (155) “To that end, Walter White issued a press release on Mitchell v. United States on April 29, 1941—one day after the case was decided. “The decision goes no further than the one handed down … in the 1914 case of McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway,” it maintained. “Both decisions ignore the fundamental issue of segregation and provide merely for substantial equality.… The time for real jubilation and belief that democracy is being attained will come when the courts unequivocally strike down all methods and modes of segregation.” (156) “Mitchell’s court fight had inspired similar battles while it was still wending its way through the lower courts, and became still more inspirational after his victory, especially once the nation entered World War II.38 During the war, the mobilization of Black and white soldiers, along with the boom in the nation’s defense industries, put unprecedented demands on the nation’s transportation system at a time when Blacks had lost all patience with traveling Jim Crow.” (156) Chapter 6: Traveling for Civil Rights 3 “The civil rights movement’s legal victories ended many of the Jim Crow humiliations forced on Black travelers by law, and opened roadside accommodations to Blacks to a greater degree than ever before. But travel discrimination and transportation inequities persist to this day” (198) “Legal scholar Michelle Alexander has pointed out that with Ronald Reagan’s election, “budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million.”27 This money made new forms of drug interdiction both possible and necessary—after all, it had to be spent on something. One of the most consequential of the new programs it funded was a nationwide highway interdiction system known as Operation Pipeline, which focused on searching drivers and vehicles.” (202) “Designed and financed by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Operation Pipeline, which debuted in 1984, has trained more than twenty-seven thousand state and local police officers to use legal traffic stops to screen for drug-related activity. Pipeline’s investigative techniques were modeled on the work of maverick crime fighters such as Bob Vogel, a Florida state trooper who claimed to have a “sixth sense” for motorists “likely to be smuggling drugs.” (202) “These developments are not surprising. Even though the civil rights movement succeeded in abolishing the South’s Jim Crow laws, the nation’s divided and divisive racial geography remains very much intact. There’s no need to travel back in time to travel Black.” (205) 4