If you needed a bathroom along the road and the gas
stations barred you from their restrooms because of the
color of your skin, a large old coffee can could serve as a
makeshift toilet in an emergency. (Standard Oil’s Esso
brand was an outlier in allowing Black patrons to use
the same toilet facilities as whites.)Large cars were also perceived as safer in car accidents,
particularly dangerous events for Black Americans.
Hospitals and healthcare were segregated; during the
1940s and 1950s only 200 Black hospitals nationwide
served the entire Black population of more than
15 million people. Dozens of stories document the
unnecessary injuries and deaths of Black Americans inA circulation sales
pitch from Green
Book publisher
Victor Hugo Green,
encouraging
hotels to buy extra
copies of his guide
to hand out as
promotional gifts
to travelers.accidents as a result of neglect and hospital segregation
under Jim Crow. Some colleges even refused to send
their students to athletic competitions for fear that
they might not return alive if they happened to be in an
accident while traveling.
In 1947, when the coach and six members of the
Clark College track team were seriously injured in
an automobile accident, an ambulance transported
them 14 miles to a hospital in Manchester, Tennessee.
Refused admission on the pretext that the hospital was
at capacity, the ambulance conveyed the two most seri-
ously injured students 30 miles farther to the Univer-
sity of the South Hospital in Sewanee, Tennessee,
which offered first aid but then sent them on their way.
Finally, Donelson, a private Black hospital in Nashville,
50 miles from the site of the accident, provided the
necessary treatment.
Automobile accidents claimed the lives of quite a few
musicians and entertainers who typically traveled late
at night after their performances. The great blues singer
Bessie Smith, Tommy Gaither of The Orioles, jazz
musician Leon “Chu” Berry, and vocalist Trevor Bacon
were among the Black entertainers who died during the
first half of the 20th century as a result of automobile
accidents and the challenge of finding hospital care.
What’s more, ambulances for white hospitals often
refused to transport Black patients, and some states
would not allow on-scene care to a Black victim until
after the white injuries were tended to. As a grim result,
many Black funeral homes used ambulances that could
serve double duty as hearses.Despite the dangers of automobile travel for Black
Americans, motor vehicles had a particularly positive
impact on civil rights. The automobile made the Civil
Rights Movement possible. “The key to the movement
was a key to an automobile ... the key to a damn good
automobile,” proclaimed the Black newspaper, the
Pittsburgh Courier.
The success of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus
boycott made famous by Rosa Parks came largely from
the purchase of a small fleet of station wagons that
picked up anyone in need of a ride and drove them to
their destinations. Black cab drivers picked up walkers
and charged them only 10 cents, the same cost of a
bus ride. These “private taxis,” along with the station
wagons and private cars that did not charge passengers,
starved the bus system of revenue until public officials
relented and eliminated segregation on the buses.
The extent to which the boycott crippled the city’s bus
lines was not known until 2018, when a cache of docu-
ments and record books surfaced in the attic of James
H. Bagley, manager of the Montgomery City Lines
Company. Losing Black patrons cost the bus company
69 percent of its revenue—demonstrating the power of
the Black working- and middle-class consumer.
The automobile proved to be essential for more
than boycotts. Cars transported voter registration
teams throughout the South to ensure the right to66 MOTORTREND.COM SEPTEMBER 2020
FEATURE I Driving While Black