The Automobile and Civil Rights
Abstractions
concerning freedom aside, the car was a real vehicle of freedom for Blacks
living in the South during the civil rights struggles of the decade. Thomas J.
Sugrue has written that the automobile enabled Blacks to escape “the insults of
Jim Crow.” More specifically, Sugrue
states that, “the car provided southern blacks a way to subvert Jim Crow.
Driving gave southern blacks a degree of freedom that they did not have on
public transportation or in most public places.”10 And Warren Brown,
writing in The Washington Post,
recalled that in 1955:
Long before the legendary Rosa Parks
defied a white Montgomery bus driver’s order to move to the back of the bus,
the city’s blacks had grown weary of such assaults on their dignity. Perhaps it
was an accumulation of those frustrations that prompted Parks, on that fateful
Thursday, December 1, 1955, to refuse to give up her seat near the front of the
bus to allow a white man to sit down. Whatever the cause, she did what she did
and blacks in Montgomery supported her by refusing to ride the city’s buses
until they could sit wherever they wanted to sit.
During that boycott, blacks used
personal cars to create what was called a “private taxi” system. They shared
rides, carried one another to work and to school – and to churches. Black
churches bought station wagons to help support the “private taxi” operation.11
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