Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance 

by Mia Bay 

Belknap, 2021. 400 pages. $35.00 hardcover.

Book Review

This is a very interesting and illuminating history of mobility and resistance in the civil rights movement. “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,” Bay writes. “Once one of the most resented forms of segregation, travel segregation is now one of the most forgotten.”

The books covers trains, cars, buses, and planes in successive chapters, showing that each technology was initially embraced by Black travelers for its potential to offer an escape from the degradation and dangers of the Jim Crow car, only to find that segregation and poor treatment awaited.

Legalized by Plessy v. Ferguson by the Supreme Court, Jim Crow established “separate but equal.” The author traces the arc from Plessy in 1896 to the Freedom Rides of 1961, when volunteers traveled on buses through the South to test the enforcement of a 1960 Supreme Court decision that decreed that interstate passengers should be served “without discrimination.”

The history involves generations of Black Americans trying to navigate a jumble of segregationist laws and customs that varied considerably from state to state and frequently depending upon a particular ticket collector or railway conductor's decisions. Black motorists couldn’t be sure if they would find a safe place to stop. In the North, the lack of segregation signs basically said rules were unspoken and unclear. As one article put it, “You could never know where insult and embarrassment are waiting for you.”