Traveling Black: A Long Journey of Resistance

Jesse Hagopian (he/him): On behalf of the Zinn Education Project we would love to welcome everybody back for another session of the Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes, our last of the school year. But, actually we’re only taking a one month break, and we’re coming right back in August. So we’ll see you all then. My name is Jesse Hagopian and I work with the Zinn Education Project, and I’m an editor for Rethinking Schools.

Now, I am so happy to welcome historian Mia Bay. Bay is the author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Professor Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history, whose recent interests include Black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Mia, it’s so good to see you. Thanks for being here.

I will jump into our first question. It was just a joy getting to read this book, and if y’all haven’t picked this up yet, everybody needs to order Traveling Black. [It’s] an incredible way to investigate the Black Freedom Struggle. I learned so much. [It] not only broadened my understanding, but reframed my understanding of the Black Freedom Struggle. So, thank you for writing this. Your framing of transportation as a lens for understanding the Black American experience really was illuminating for me.

I just wanted to read a quote from the book. You write,

Travel and transportation are central to the study of the segregation era, which generally is bookmarked on one end by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 — a railroad case in which the U.S. Supreme Court gave sanction to du jour segregation — and on the other end by the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other protests designed to end segregation and transportation.

So, can you tell us more about why you chose to tell the history of the fight against segregation and racism, and the broader struggles for racial justice, through the lens of transportation? And what does this lens reveal that other narratives often overlook?

Mia Bay: I kind of found my way to this topic. I became very curious about segregation when I was writing a book on Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusader, and realized that what really got her going on racial justice was the experience of being kicked off a train. I began to look more, and what really struck me about travel was that it was an experience of segregation and discrimination that virtually everyone had to deal with. There was no sort of escape by virtue of being upper class or anything else. And it was something that people often confronted as an individual. Yet it was at the same time something that almost defined the Black experience. The more I researched it, the more I realized that there was a throughline. This was just something that would not go away as a major problem in Black life, and it had been ignored. I think these issues of infrastructure, and how you walk through the world, sometimes escape our notice, or we experience them as individuals. But when you look at it all together, I was like, there is a big story here. So, that’s the story I set out to tell.

Hagopian: Yeah, I noticed it popping up here and there and didn’t put it together the way you did until I read your book. Seeing Octavius Catto’s struggle during Reconstruction, his refusal to leave a bus. And these instances just keep popping up. It was fascinating the way you framed it.

You talk about the transition from the Reconstruction era to Jim Crow. You write, “With the legalization of segregation, the Jim Crow car became a powerful symbol of the State sanctioned degradation of all African Americans. For Blacks who grew up before the passage of the South’s separate car laws, the Jim Crow car was a galling reminder of the rights they had lost.”

We have a whole Reconstruction campaign at the Zinn Education Project. We really want to highlight that era, and then how it transitioned to Jim Crow. So I wanted to ask you, how did the segregation and humiliation of Black passengers on the train car help shape America’s overall identity as a nation. one that saw itself as powerful and free and mobile while denying those very rights to Black folks and others? And what forms of resistance did Black passengers begin to create in response?

Bay: Well, the Jim Crow car was sort of sanctioned by Plessy as separate but equal, but it was not. It was separate but unequal, and deliberately so. The Jim Crow cars were always less comfortable, dirtier, more dangerous. People who rode in them understood that. The message was that they were inferior, and yet at the same time African Americans could not escape them. Even people who had the money to travel first class or get better accommodations weren’t allowed to, so they defined a certain ceiling that Blacks could not go over. Or, as W. E. B. Du Bois said during that time period, a Black person was defined as someone who had to ride Jim Crow in Georgia. So it became a metaphor for everything negative Black people experienced.

Yet, at the same time, the Jim Crow car on the trains was not really well supported by law. Plessy v. Ferguson, it was a railroad case, and it did say that Louisiana could provide separate but equal accommodations for train passengers in Louisiana. But it actually did not address interstate transportation. There’s some language in Plessy explaining that interstate transportation is not governed by the Interstate Commerce Office and the court cannot really address what goes on in the interstate world of transportation, where if you buy something in one state, it should still be valuable in the next state. The Interstate Commerce Commission, when it was founded, never really signed off on segregation. So there was a legal hole that many Black people pursue.

Then there was also just the day-to-day experience where many people — long before Rosa Parks — were just like, “This is intolerable. I will not do it.” And that was accentuated by the fact that traveling Jim Crow was very complicated. In the North, Jim Crow wasn’t practiced, or wasn’t practiced in the same way. People would travel South and not know what they were supposed to do, they would end up defying Jim Crow laws without meaning to and found them generally impossible to follow. So it was just a constant area of friction, and one in which people were very vulnerable. I mean, as you know, when you travel you are vulnerable. You need to be able to sit down, you need to be able to go to the bathroom, you need to be able to be relatively comfortable, and all of these things were not anything that people could count on if they were traveling Black. So it becomes this issue that never goes away.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. I really appreciated the way that you analyzed this intersectionally and understood the overlapping forms of oppression that people faced on these trains, traveling while Black, and specifically the way they became gendered spaces and the way Black women face particular challenges. You write in Traveling Black,

A product of the Victorian era, ideals of public domesticity helped make railroad cars and steamship cabins safe spaces for white women. But white home at the center of these ideals was rarely welcoming to Black travelers. As Barbara Welke and other legal scholars have shown, gender and race played a central role in the rise of both de facto and du jour segregation on Southern railroads.

In that light, I was wondering how the system of “ladies cars” and the broader ideals of white womanhood shape the racial and gender dynamics of public transportation. Also, how does this history help us understand the broader struggle of Black women to claim their rights, their safety, and dignity in public spaces designed to exclude them?

Bay: Good question. Thank you. That was one thing that got me on this whole question of travel. I was fascinated to find out that there had been a system of ladies cars that predated the system of colored cars. One of the reasons it fascinated me was the dilemma it imposed on Black women. Women were supposed to ride in the ladies cars, which were developed by the railroads to make sure that women were willing to ride the train. They were more comfortable. They didn’t allow smoking. They drew on an older tradition of having ladies cabins on the steamships where women could spend the night or be sheltered. All of this was about making travel comfortable for women, making it safe, making it offer some privacy, someplace to accommodate children, and it posed an almost existential dilemma for Black women because they needed to be safe. They might have children; they need to be comfortable. There was a message that this was not possible, and it was very problematic, because if you didn’t ride in the ladies car in a 19th century train, you would be put in the smoking car, which was a place where men would gather to gamble, smoke cigars, chew snuff. There were just a variety of reasons, from sexual harassment to the discomfort of the smoky environment, that many women just found intolerable. And if they were Black they were not allowed to act on this. It was a double burden for women, and one that helps us explain why women are often taking the lead in protesting travel, because it’s posing a particularly harsh dilemma on them.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. You tell some wild stories of what even young girls had to go through on the train. They are really disturbing and, I think, as you said, point to why women often took the lead in these struggles. I want to look at how this wasn’t just a Southern phenomenon, though. I really appreciated that about your book, because too many discussions of segregation confine it to the South, and you challenge that by meticulously documenting racial discrimination on trains, on buses, [and in] taxis in the North. You write,

The North and the West had no segregation laws, so in those regions segregation on buses was never ubiquitous, as it was in the South. And people who challenged discrimination on those buses in court were often successful, but their lawsuits rarely changed bus company policies, nor did the bad publicity that bus segregation engendered, which was largely confined to the Black press. The segregation, and sometimes exclusion, that Blacks encountered on Northern buses diminished only modestly over time.

I was hoping you could talk about some of the most important myths about free movement in the North that your research dispels, and what does that limited access to legal challenges in the North reveal about the broader struggle for racial justice?

Bay: Another great question. I mean, I think it reveals that discrimination became national, that the country was developing in a way that brought that and ensured that this would happen. In both regions, people were moving around. This is the era of the Great Migration, which brought not only millions of Black people North, it brought southerners North. It helped bring the nation together, but in a way that also helped ensure that racism was a national phenomenon. And this is true of the culture generally. If you look at movies and stuff, you see racism traveling through the culture. All of this affected the way that people traveled in the North, and [the way] people were treated in the North.

A lot of the stuff around travel had to do with whether there were accommodations for Blacks, whether people felt like people were willing to travel with Blacks. So, on early buses, the bus companies often were concerned that other passengers wouldn’t welcome Blacks. That the rest stops and gas stations and so forth wouldn’t accept Black passengers who wanted to go to the bathroom, who wanted to eat, and this would be one reason why they would discourage Black passengers. It’s sort of this informal discrimination that’s nonetheless very powerful. And the bus companies — which were in a perennial state of expansion, and had different ownerships and franchises — just did not care that much. So it was very difficult to address in any concerted way, and it was generally something difficult to mobilize whites about, especially since it was largely invisible to whites.

Hagopian: Thank you for making it visible for all of us today. I hope that it will lead to many educators here reaching thousands of kids with the understanding that segregation and racism were embedded in the North in transportation, and beyond. Such an important way to reframe understanding our country.

You not only talk about the many forms of discrimination and racism that occurred, but also the people who fought back. Much of Traveling Black focuses on everyday acts of resistance, not just the larger instances that we are more familiar with. So, I was hoping you could talk about how refusal, how endurance, and really just how traveling while Black itself became a form of political struggle. Maybe you could share a story from the book about one of your favorite examples, or most striking examples of Black resistance in motion.

Bay: Sure. One thing that struck me is one of the research sources I used for this book was the NAACP travel complaints files. There are stacks and stacks and stacks of them. People would write the NAACP and say, “This happened to me. Are they allowed to do this?” It was something that people were not taking quietly, [while] other people just outright refused and took whatever consequences, which could mean being thrown in jail. So, it’s just something that’s perennially going on, and people are trying to exchange information. Part of it is that one thing African Americans know throughout this period is that they’re consumers. They’ve paid for train tickets and bus tickets. They should be getting equal accommodations, and often the people who resist are simply taking a stand on that. There are many, many Rosa Parks’ before Rosa Parks, who refused to put up with some of the indignities that they’re confronted with.

Hagopian: No doubt. You mentioned Ida B. Wells. I love that. I don’t know if there was one or two others you wanted to reference so teachers can go learn and look them up.

Bay: Some of them are very tragic. There was a young woman named Lola Houck, who was pregnant. She was supposed to be riding in the smoking car in Texas [but] she could not stand to stay in it because the air was so bad. She was getting ill because of her pregnancy, so she ended up riding in between the cars for hours, got quite sick afterwards, and subsequently sued the railroad. She’s someone you might look for. I believe there’s an article about her you can probably find.

Hagopian: Right on. Thank you. Let’s talk about the Green Book. Some people have heard about this because of that one movie. But, in Traveling Black you show how the rise of the automobile in the 20th century both increased mobility for Black families — which was cool because it offered a way to avoid segregated buses and trains — but it also introduced new dangers and new limitations. I really liked the way you explained how that transition affected Black families. And Black travelers faced the constant threat now of police harassment while driving, violent attacks and the inability to find safe places to eat or to sleep, or even stop for gas.

My dad told me a lot of stories about how every summer, he grew up in LA, and his dad would drive the family to New Orleans every summer so they could go play with their cousins. I mean, they always had a story on that drive. His dad sometimes would have to drive all night because it was just too dangerous to stop, or they couldn’t find a safe place to stay and sleep, and they had to pack food because they never knew if they would get served. You show in the book that this was a common experience for Black families across the country, and it’s part of what made resources like the Negro Motorist Green Book so vital. How do you think people misunderstand the Green Book today? What do we need to better understand about how Black travelers navigated this geography of danger and resistance, both in the past and even driving while Black is still dangerous today?

Bay: For sure. I think the Green Book movie promoted a couple of different misunderstandings. One was that the Green Book actually solved the problem, which it did not. It came out once a year. It’s Victor Green and his family who published it out of New York. He didn’t have the resources to go check the information, so it was advertisements often, and they were not necessarily up to date. I mean, if you ever had problems with Yelp reviews for a place that’s no longer there, or that’s incorrect, [then] magnify that by about a thousand. Some people would report that the place that the Green Book recommended was now actually a whorehouse. And there were many, many areas that it did not cover. There were a whole bunch of different books like the Green Book. But not nobody could carry all of them, and none of them really covered everything.

So that was one thing. The other thing was that it didn’t cover enough in the sense that you still had to go tremendous lengths of time. What people actually did, what I think was actually more common than using any kind of book, was that people figured out where to go by talking to friends and relatives and trying to get a sense from someone who had traveled the same route relatively recently, how you might go there. This wasn’t always possible, and it was tremendously cumbersome.

One thing that was striking to me is, we have this American mythology of the open road, but what you see Black people doing to prepare for a trip is writing friends weeks, months before, calling people up doing all this research, being super careful, and then, as you said, doing things like traveling at night, packing their cars full of everything, from gas to food. It creates a very different form of travel, one that you have to prepare for in elaborate ways, and maybe a different relationship to travel. Also, one of the things that studies over the years found was that African Americans were actually less likely to travel recreationally than white people. I think they still are, statistically speaking. We most often went to visit relatives. It put these constraints on where African Americans could move. and these consequences or dangers that are attached to moving.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. Thank you for breaking that all down.

[breakout rooms]

Hagopian: Welcome back, everybody. Now I want to come back with Professor Bay and continue our discussion. I wanted to start by just asking you about how deadly, how dangerous has traveling Black been, especially in the Jim Crow era? Then, if you could talk about how common acts of resistance were to Jim Crow trains and other forms of racism in transportation.

Bay: Traveling Black in the Jim Crow era was very dangerous. There was all kinds of violence that people could experience if they did not follow the rules. People got thrown off trains. Sometimes people got beat up. And the actual system itself was dangerous, especially with trains, because one of the ways that the railroads adapted and ultimately reconciled themselves with segregation was that they didn’t use separate but equal cars. Instead, they put African Americans in the older cars. This became a serious problem at the turn of the century, because trains were slowly moving from having wooden cars, which were more dangerous generally. The old wooden cars often had a stove in the middle, and the move towards all metal cars actually meant that the cars would become less dangerous. There was one ad in a railroad publication that said, “No more fires on your train, people. Buy the metal cars”. But they didn’t buy the metal cars for the Jim Crow cars. So, by the time you get to around 1911, you would have cars where the Jim Crow car was the only wooden car on the train. If there was a crash — which was not all that unlikely at that time. There were still a fair number of train crashes — the Jim Crow car would be where all the injuries and fatalities were. The biggest train crashes in American history, like the famous one in Tennessee where almost a hundred people died, the casualties are pretty much all in the Jim Crow cars. And this was something African Americans knew, journalists in particular. But also many people, and there were complaints.

The government was also aware of it, and had at one point suggested to the railroads that they simply replace all the cars with metal cars. But that hadn’t happened. And this went on until 1951. That was the last Jim Crow crash where you have a wooden car shattered like an accordion between the locomotive and a metal passenger car. So these dangers are manifold. There’s many of them. This doesn’t curb the resistance.

One thing that is striking is that despite the dangers of resisting, resistance is pretty much continuous. I mean, we hear about Rosa Parks originating it, then we go back to let’s say Elizabeth Jennings [Graham] in New York. But it goes further back than that. It’s on stage coaches. Someone like John Rock, who was an abolitionist and a dentist, and would get into these fistfights on stagecoaches when they tried to put them on top of the stagecoach, which is where they try to make you sit. He got thrown off stagecoaches. Frederick Douglass once refused to move so adamantly on a railroad coach that it took three or four men to pick him up and get him out of there. And he took the entire bank of chairs he was sitting on with him when he left! He just was not going to move. You have stories like that from every particular moment. Ida B. Wells, [who I] I mentioned before, she actually bit the conductor when he was trying to lift her out of her chair. People fought and they fought hard, and sometimes they suffered real consequences as a result of the resistance. But this was something people just resisted time and again in ways that reflected how strongly they felt about the issue.

Hagopian: No doubt. That conductor should not have put his hands on Ida B. Wells. He had to learn the hard way! Somebody dropped in the chat that it’s still dangerous to travel Black, and I agree. My own experience confirms that. You write in Traveling Black, “Even after segregation was outlawed, discrimination in travel persisted, in part because of weak enforcement and the resilience of racial customs.” And this feels especially relevant today. We are still seeing racial discrimination in mobility, whether it’s Black passengers being denied rides by Uber or the deadly consequences of driving while Black. Sandra Bland’s story just turns my blood cold. And Philando Castile. What parallels do you see between the past that you document and the present we’re living through now?

Bay: I mean, there are so many, and we see them writ large in our recent history. The whole Black Lives Matter movement involves a lot of violence that takes place on the roadsides around racial profiling, around the way the police stop and treat Black travelers who are stopped. Things can escalate as they did in the case of Sandra Bland. Then there are more everyday experiences, like many Black passengers reporting that if they are traveling first class, nobody believes that they’re traveling first class, and they’re being harassed and mistreated. African Americans still have this sort of experience of walking through the world, and people are making judgments about whether they are entitled to enter certain spaces or to sit beside white people on equal terms. All of that can be extremely disturbing, and sometimes also really inconvenience people. Then, of course, the stuff on the highways and with the police is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than it ever was. The statistics on police shootings are, of course, terrible, and they are so often associated with movement and African Americans, who are judged to somehow be out of place.

Hagopian: It’s incredible that it’s still happening. But we are going to have to continue the struggle. There’s a lot of teachers here that want to be part of that, a lot of educators here that want to help empower the youth to be part of that. So I was hoping you could talk about how educators could use your book, Traveling Black, in the classroom, and what lessons or themes do you especially hope educators will engage students with as they learn about the history of Black mobility and resistance as part of the broader Black Freedom Struggle?

Bay: Great question. I think educators can start out by encouraging kids to think about how people move through the world and whether they’re safe, how they achieve safety, if they’re not, whether things are equitable. What is their world looking like? How are people relating to each other? I mean, so much of what remains problematic in American society is visible to us when we look around, and kids need to think about it and develop ambitions around changing things.

I guess the thing I learned about activism in writing this book was that it took so many people being active, staging resistance, educating themselves to create change, that it’s a lesson to us who feel like, “Oh, it’s hopeless.” Change is something that requires a lot of work and it doesn’t come out of one perfect program of activism. Instead, it comes out of a lot of people trying a lot of things, studying the matter, learning from failure, pressing the issue again and again. Kids should learn that, because sometimes I think we have an idealized knowledge of how we can have one protest and that’s the end of it. We have an idealized version of how things ended, like Rosa Park got tired one day and was like, “I’m not going to do this,” and that was the end of it. Instead, we need to understand that it’s a constant struggle, and that people have to think about what’s equitable and fight for it on a daily basis.

Hagopian: Demystifying the struggle so young people don’t think it’s just like this one magic moment, and you just have to wait for lightning to strike like Rosa Parks, refusing to sit, and instead, understanding the ongoing struggle, that she already refused to get up before the time that she’s famous for that. There were others many years before that it took an ongoing, relentless struggle to reach the place where the community was ready to organize and to get behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Bay: And I think what’s really relevant today, too, is that you have to try to protect the freedoms that you have, or that you thought you had. That nothing is guaranteed. So, you really have to look around you.

Hagopian: Well, we’re seeing that here in Seattle where, during the 2020 uprising, we removed police from the schools. They’re [now] proposing putting them back in. So, we only have as much freedom as what we’re willing to struggle for. And I do hope that some of those lessons come through in more and more educators’ lesson plans.

I just wanted to ask you one more broad question about some of the overarching themes of your book, and hopefully give people a deeper sense of the importance of looking at the Black Freedom Struggle through this lens. Early in Traveling Black you write, “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.” In your book you show that the fight for mobility has never just been about getting from one place to the next place. You argue that freedom to move has long been central to the very meaning of what freedom is. But it’s a freedom that Black folks have been systematically denied. So, how do you hope this understanding of mobility, not as a convenience but as a core site of racial hierarchy and struggle and resistance, shapes the way we think about the Black Freedom Struggle more broadly, and really about American history as a whole?

Bay: Well, thinking about it makes us have to think about really how true freedom involves being able to live where you like, being able to seek a job wherever there are jobs. This sounds obvious in certain ways, but one of the ways in which opportunities have long been delimited for many Americans is through transportation. You can only take a job if you can actually get to it on a regular basis. We have never had a full and equitable transportation system, or even one that could move everyone where they needed to go. That’s really striking today, where people often have long commutes or are dependent on cars, even though they can’t afford them. There’s inequities around transportation and downright barriers that shape the lives of a lot of poor people today, of a lot of Black and Brown people today. It can be kind of invisible to us, but it is one of the major issues of our time, and one that isn’t being addressed today. It’s now also combining with climate change, where we need both more equitable transportation and transportation that is not damaging to our world. It’s not something that we’re all necessarily thinking about, but it’s something we need to be thinking about, because so much of American freedom is about being able to take advantage of opportunities. But you can’t do that if you can’t get to them.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. That’s so well put, and such an important reframing. I learned so much from your book. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

While this transcript was edited, there may be minor errors or typos — if you notice something you believe to be incorrect, please contact us at zep@zinnedproject.org.