Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance.

• Author: Bates, David

Bay, Mia. Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap, 2021. 391 pages. Paperback, $19.95.

In the epilogue of this vital and fascinating new book, historian Mia Bay quotes civil rights activist John LeFlore, who, late in his life, lamented that the struggle for equality in American transportation had stretched "across different eras" and taken forms that younger activists "do not appreciate" (306.) LeFlore's argument succinctly mirrors Bay's own scholarly intervention: for too long, scholars have not recognized the central importance of travel and mobility to Black history. To rectify this, Traveling Black traces the history of "Black mobility as an enduring focal point of struggles over equality and difference" (3.)

The book is organized in rough chronological order, covering the Civil War era through the dawn of the Black Freedom Movement, but its true structure is thematic. Between big-picture bookends, Bay's chapters detail the history of Black protest regarding railroads, cars, buses, and airplanes. Each of these chapters is an absorbing narrative unto itself, offering details about the peculiarities of each mode of transit, and how those peculiarities became battlegrounds in the struggle against segregation and other forms of racist oppression. In the case of railroads, for instance, Bay notes that so-called "Negro cars" or "Jim Crow cars" were inevitably placed near the front of the train--and made of wood as opposed to steel--giving train derailments and crashes a gruesome "racial logic" (71.) Yet Black Americans both resisted and exploited these systems in ingenious ways. Pullman rail cars contained a private compartment known as the "Lower 13"; Black passengers were frequently placed in the Lower 13 to keep them separate from other passengers, thus giving them a berth with a private bathroom--an extravagance that usually cost twice the price of a regular ticket, but at no extra charge.

Bay's book is a terrific success because of its ability to balance perspectives, offering a large-scale view of the forces that structured Black travel and mobility, as well as vivid personal narratives of how those structures were felt and resisted. Traveling Black offers a detailed explanation of the background behind Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, but also Black passengers' deep bitterness at being transported alongside luggage, coal, lanterns and other supplies, and, in some cases, police and their manacled...