Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance.

• Date: 01 September 2022
• Author: Bates, David
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• 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...