The Green Book and other
travel guides would help Black
motorists find friendly hotels,
service stations, nightclubs,
barbershops, and restaurants
along their journey.Black motorists
sought out
reliable cars,
for fear of being
stranded in
an area that
wouldn’t provide
them essential
services.In fact, publisher Victor Hugo Green had long
hoped improved race relations would make his
guides obsolete; with the passage of the Civil Rights
Act in 1964, many Black Americans were hopeful
that would be the case. (The Green Book ceased
publication two years later.)
But in the 1990s, a new phrase entered the Amer-
ican lexicon—“Driving While Black”—revealing that
the danger, harassment, and even violence while
operating a car on the road in the United States had
not faded into memory. The legacy of this history
even into the present day means that driving a
car remains for Black Americans a potentially
life-threatening activity, especially when it comes to
police traffic stops.
We should see these dismal events not simply as a
legacy of slavery and racism but also as the continua-
tion of restrictions on mobility that Black Americans
faced from the start.
Throughout history, Black Americans have had a
complicated relationship with law enforcement and
with the American road. Yet the Black experience is
about a journey from slavery to freedom over a very
contested road—both literal and symbolic. And the
automobile plays an essential role in understanding
the key place of the freedom of mobility in a democ-
racy and in race relations today.
The ability to travel freely without restrictions
is a basic right of a free society that holds special
meaning for Black Americans. A legacy of invol-
untary travel from slave days, evolving into legal
prohibitions on everyday movements, confinement
within certain neighborhoods, and exclusion by
law from traveling within particular communities
even into the 20th century, makes the right to come
and go as you please an essential component of
civil rights. The automobile enabled this mobility,
making self-directed travel a possibility when travel
by bus and train could lead to humiliating or even
life-threatening encounters.
On buses Black travelers and commuters faced
rude (and often gun-toting) bus drivers who made
sure they sat in the back of buses or stood so that
white passengers had comfortable places to sit.
Sometimes Black riders had to pay for the ride up
front and were told by the driver to enter the bus by
the rear door—only to have the bus pull away as they
walked to the back door.
Trains also separated travelers by race. Less
clean, less comfortable, and more crowded accom-
modations almost always defined these segregated
railroad cars.
A 1939 Seaboard Coast Line timetable for the
New York-to-Miami route described comfortable,
“reclining, deluxe seats” in the main coaches. But the
promotion cautioned Black American passengers
that the “Colored Coach [is] not Air-Conditioned.”
Bathrooms were often cleaned less frequently in
the “colored” coach (if they were cleaned at all), and
Black travelers complained of dirty and threadbare
seats. Passengers traveling south might secure a
regular or first-class seat in Chicago, Detroit, New
York, or Newark, only to be asked to move to the
“colored” car once the train crossed that symbolic
Mason–Dixon Line.
The ready availability of the automobile, begin-
ning in the first half of the 20th century, held distinct
importance and promise. The car poked a finger in
the eye of those who wanted to see the continuation
of the separate, unequal public-transportation facil-
ities. At least, that is how some Black car owners saw
their defiance of Jim Crow facilities.SEPTEMBER 2020 MOTORTREND.COM 63