Traveling Black

<p><b>Winner of the Bancroft Prize<br>Winner of the David J. Langum Prize<br>Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award<br>Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award<br>Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award<br>A <i>New York Times</i> Critics' Top Book of the Year</b> <p/>This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation...Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle.<br>--Ibram X. Kendi author of <i>How to Be an Antiracist</i> <p/>In Mia Bay's superb history of mobility and resistance the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large.<br>--Jennifer Szalai <i>New York Times</i> <p/><i>Traveling Black</i> is well worth the fare. Indeed it is certain to become the new standard on this important and too often forgotten history.<br>--Henry Louis Gates Jr. author of <i>Stony the Road</i> <p/>From <i>Plessy v. Ferguson</i> to #DrivingWhileBlack African Americans have fought to move freely around the United States. But why this focus on Black mobility? From stagecoaches and trains to buses cars and planes <i>Traveling Black</i> explores when how and why racial restrictions took shape in America and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. <p/>Mia Bay rescues forgotten stories of passengers who made it home despite being insulted stranded re-routed or ignored. She shows that Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations documenting a sustained fight for redress that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A riveting character-rich account of the rise and fall of racial segregation it reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws--and why free movement has been at the heart of the quest for racial justice ever since.</p>