Enlivened by Sorin's personal history, Driving While Black opens an entirely new view onto the African American experience, and shows why travel was so central to the Civil Rights movement. Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression. Book Title: Driving While Black : African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights.
#Driving while black book drivers#
Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. Kenneth Meeks's well-researched and disturbing book details the origins, practices, consequences, and solutions to this problem. The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America, released last month, looks at how the Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans, helped. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. For many African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Asian Americans, such incidents are known as DWBs-Driving While Black-or examples of racial profiling. Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, by Gretchen Sorin, is a riveting story on how the automobile opened up opportunities for blacks in the U.S. The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. 11, 2020 How the automobile was both a machine of liberation and a potential peril for African Americans during the early decades of the 20th centuryand beyond.
Lucidly written and generously illustrated with photos and artifacts, this rigorous and entertaining history deserves a wide readership.How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life-the true history beyond the Best Picture–winning movie. DRIVING WHILE BLACK AFRICAN AMERICAN TRAVEL AND THE ROAD TO CIVIL RIGHTS by Gretchen Sorin RELEASE DATE: Feb.
She illustrates how the increased confidence and broader horizons of black drivers fuelled the civil rights movement, while noting that the end of segregation doomed black-owned businesses that served the market. Sorin met Burns while serving as commentator for his 1999 film New York: A.
Car ownership, she contends, facilitated opportunities for travel and employment and provided African-Americans with a "rolling living room" to transport themselves from one "safe zone" to another. The League is thrilled to host acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin for an author talk as part of our Preservation Book Club. As she began her book, she approached Ric Burns to work with her on a film. Though black motorists in the Jim Crow South had to rely on The Negro Motorist Green Book to locate gas stations, eateries, and motels that would serve them and to avoid "sundown towns" where they were at risk after dark, African-Americans viewed the car as an escape from the humiliation and dangers of segregated public transportation systems, Sorin writes. Drawing upon archival research, interviews, and her own family's history, Sorin emphasizes the strict limitations on mobility experienced by African-Americans from slavery's Middle Passage through the Jim Crow era, and the extent to which access to a car meant freedom, at least temporarily. Sorin, director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program in museum studies at SUNY Oneonta, depicts the historical relationship between African-Americans and the automobile as one of promise as well as peril in this insightful debut.
0 kommentar(er)
