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Driving while black : African American travel and the road to civil rights

Sorin, Gretchen Sullivan2020
Books, Manuscripts
It's hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for African Americans. Before the Civil War, masters confined their slaves to their property, while free black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned, and even kidnapped. Restrictions on movement before Emancipation carried over, in different forms, into Reconstruction and beyond; for most of the 20th century, many white Americans felt blithely comfortable denying their black countrymen the right to travel freely on trains and buses. Yet it became more difficult to shackle someone who was cruising along a highway at 45 miles per hour. Interwoven with Sorin's own family history and enhanced by dozens of little known images, 'Driving While Black' charts how the automobile fundamentally reshaped African American life, and opens up an entirely new view onto one of the most important issues of our time.
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