Review of Gretchen Sorin's "Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights"

Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights. New York: Liveright, 2020.

 

It has been said that the most creative is the most personal, and that is certainly the case of Gretchen Sorin’s Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights. This engaging book is a story within a story. Each chapter begins with the author’s personal family narrative of automotive travel, whether it be back to ancestral roots in North Carolina, adolescent memories in New Jersey, or a vacation to Niagara Falls. I eagerly looked forward to each autobiographical preface, as these openings prepared me for meaty historical discussions on identity, emotions, and conflict within the context of racism.  The author’s own accounts made the academic material that followed more real and meaningful.

The author is a distinguished professor and director to the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. While scholars have discussed the African America 20^th century automotive travel experience (and the importance of The Negro Motorist Green Book)  piecemeal  on numerous occasions of late, Sorin’s work is the first book dedicated to the topic that I know of. Her monograph follows up on Cotton Seiler’s seminal Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008), a study that first pointed out The Green Book as a rich source for understanding the 20^th century past. And as Seiler, Sorin focuses on automobile users rather than makers, reflecting a more recent trend among academics.

In a nutshell,  Sorin argues how the automobile had both profound and unexpected consequences in the lives of 20^th century African Americans. As a self-directed mode of transport, cars allowed Blacks a way to avoid humiliating situations brought on by Jim Crow laws, took them with minimized risk between “black spaces” and “white spaces,” challenged segregation, and took them on business travel and vacations. To do this, travel strategies were employed involving maps and itineraries, including the most significant of those tools, Victor and Alma Green’s The Negro Motorists Green Book (Later The Negro Travel’s Green Book). A close read of The Green Book reveals that its publishers firmly believed that travel by automobile was transformative for Blacks, as it elevated not only the traveler but also those encountered along the way. And on the way the 1940s and 1950s African American traveler could count on an infrastructure of Black-owned hotels, resorts, and service stations, such as American Beach in Florida; Oaks Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard; Idlewild in Northwest Michigan; and Val Verde near Los Angeles.  After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, these businesses began to suffer as Black consumer preferences changed.

            While the automobile as an artifact is in the background in this book, I did learn something surprising that one would find in a more traditional automotive history. Namely, I had no idea that the most popular make among Blacks in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. was far and away a Buick. Next were Ford and Chevys as one might expect. Interestingly, the Cadillac was in 8^th place, although percentages do not reflect cultural preferences as mirrored in song and urban legend.

            This book’s 332 pages contain an overarching message that goes well beyond automotive travel, however. Sorin’s big point centers on racism in America, on the justice system as being fair and equal and deep divisions that the automobile has done not enough to ameliorate. In sum, the United States remains a deeply divided nation. She closes this way: “Nowadays the phrase driving while black refers, needless to say, to the ongoing mutual distrust between African Americans and law enforcement in so many communities across the country” (p.262).  And while race is certainly important to any understanding of the American past, I would not at the same time neglect class. Class divisions are a second elephant in any room that purports to unravel the American past and present. 

 

To conclude, I wholeheartedly recommend this work, as it gives us pause to think about ourselves and the nation during these challenging days. As required reading in my Fall 2021 class, I hope it makes an impact on my students as it did me.