When her family traveled south, they were sure to pack plenty of food and blankets for the children so that they did not have to stop at segregated restaurants and risk being denied a place to sleep. Wheeler assured the “free ingress and egress to and from any other state”-but that was “a right denied to African Americans.” While white Americans took to the road merrily, writes the author, they were “comfortable denying their black countrymen not only the right to travel freely but also the ability to use public accommodations”-and this is key in Sorin’s powerful story.

The right to move about among the states had always been considered a fundamental constitutional right-the 1920 Supreme Court case United States v. Moreover, driving in one’s own car meant not having to adhere to the humiliating Jim Crow laws regarding seating in public transportation. In the first few decades of the 20th century, owning a car demonstrated economic success, and that was certainly the case for a growing black middle class. In addition to offering an eye-opening history of the terrible discrimination practiced routinely against African American drivers, Sorin (Director, Cooperstown Graduate Program/SUNY co-author: Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, 2008, etc.) also discusses her own family’s years of distress driving from New Jersey to North Carolina to visit relatives in the late 1950s.

How the automobile was both a machine of liberation and a potential peril for African Americans during the early decades of the 20th century-and beyond.

Driving while black book