Mia Bay is the author of the new book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Her other books include To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. She is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.
Q: What inspired you to write Traveling Black?
A: A couple of things. One is that the book I published before this was a biography of Ida B. Wells, a Black antilynching crusader and activist. She got her start when she was kicked out of the “ladies’ car” on a train in Tennessee.
It was before Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that gave approval to “separate but equal.” But informally, they were not allowing Black people good accommodations. She sued, and lost in the state Supreme Court.
It inspired me, and made me curious about how we got from ladies’ cars to colored cars to the back of the bus. I started researching that.
Also, this was around the time of Katrina, and I was struck by the images of African Americans stuck in the Superdome. I wanted to look at the mobility of African Americans in the 19th century and today.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: It was an interesting research process—a lot of following people along on their journey. Through newspapers and court cases, I could find out about the challenging journeys people had. I tried to reconstruct what it was like to get from point A to point B.
State commissions changed railroad rates--Jim Crow cars were often second class, with lower prices, but it was changed so people had to pay the same prices. Blacks had to pay more to travel in worse conditions. Separate but equal was never equal, because you had to pay the same amount.
There were Jim Crow train crashes. As railroads replaced equipment, they placed old cars with new cars, but used the old ones for Jim Crow cars.
From the late 19th century to around 1951, there was a series of train crashes. Almost everybody who was injured or died was in the Jim Crow cars. It was shocking. African Americans were aware of this, but no one else took it seriously.
With cars, there were the racial rules of the road. A Black person was supposed to stop for a White person in a car. It didn’t work, for various reasons.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book calls it "A book that shocks, shames, and enlightens with critical scholarship on the Black pursuit of genuine liberty." What do you think of that description?
A: It’s a good description. It captures the ways certain things were shocking and shameful, the kind of thing people don’t necessarily record.
Q: You conclude the book by writing, "There's no need to travel back in time to travel Black." How would you describe traveling Black today, and what do you see looking ahead?
A: I wish the book could end on a high note. You would think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got rid of Jim Crow cars and back-of-the-bus seating, but as I came to the end, in many ways the desegregation of transportation was a pyrrhic victory.
In the 1960s, there was a turn to overwhelmingly car-centric travel. At the point that public long-distance transportation was desegregated, it becomes far less widely available.
It is a genuine issue for many people who can’t afford cars in this country, who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. We spend more money on roads than on [public] transportation.
Transportation has been one of the issues of our era, complicated by the pandemic. Until recently I lived in New York, and the amount of time people spent getting to work on public transportation was horrifying. During the pandemic, it was dangerous to travel, and it affected minorities.
Traveling Black continues to be dangerous. There’s police profiling, harassment, and violence that Black drivers are subjected to. This became endemic in the 1980s with the war on drugs. Police profiling has targeted Black and Hispanic drivers, with terrible outcomes like the ones that are being adjudicated now.
As a historian I don’t have to propose solutions. I’m hoping we are on a better track, but people are traumatized by their experiences.
Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?
A: What I learned is that we don’t think about infrastructure, getting from one place to another, the vulnerability of people going from one place to another.
You’re told you can go wherever you want, that it’s a hypermobile society. But it remains not equally easy for everyone to do these things. It’s not as easy for some to be mobile. This was highlighted in the case of Katrina, where there was no way to get people out. There was no plan for people who weren’t in a car.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A different project that I started before this one, about African Americans’ views of Thomas Jefferson over the years, from his own lifetime onward.
My first book was about African American ideas about White people in the 19th century. There was a lot of discussion about Jefferson in Black newspapers. The book starts from that observation, and analyzes the commentary, from his lifetime into the late 19th century, and maybe to today.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I found the research for this book to be interesting in terms of the history of technology and how people travel. There were a lot of pictures. I tried to imagine how people were moving through the world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment