Publishers Weekly
★ 11/18/2019
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Lucidly written and generously illustrated with photos and artifacts, this rigorous and entertaining history deserves a wide readership. (Feb.)
Sarah A. Seo
"Unlike some of the more familiar narratives—the march from Selma to Montgomery that culminated in the Voting Rights Act, or Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated anti-miscegenation laws—the story Sorin tells does not conclude with a victory but with today’s crisis of mass incarceration. . . . Driving While Black highlights the dangers of such discrimination by describing the necessities that were denied to black Americans as they traveled. . . . Her argument raises an intriguing question: Can consumerism count as activism? . . . Had Driving While Black ended with the Civil Rights Act and Heart of Atlanta Motel, it would have hewed to traditional narratives of the civil rights movement, which typically begin with a struggle against legalized discrimination, climax with nonviolent protest, and conclude with a legislative or courtroom victory. But a triumphant history that ends with a hard-won anti-discrimination law would seem naïve today, especially when poverty and injustice exact an uneven toll on people of color. Instead, Driving While Black jumps to the 1990s and continues to the present day in its epilogue."
New Yorker
"This excellent history illuminates how car ownership provided a measure of safety and independence and also played a vital role in the civil-rights movement."
Ric Burns
"Gretchen Sorin has spent decades exploring this deeply researched, acutely felt, and penetrating study of race, space, and mobility in America—and a lifetime thinking about the issues and experiences that underlie it. No one who reads Driving While Black can fail to be moved and wonderstruck by how far American society has come in the last century and a half in forwarding the dream of equal mobility for all, and by how far we still have to go."
Fath Davis Ruffins
"This is the first authoritative book about the actual social, economic, and political history of African-Americans and cars. Sorin’s accessible style invites the reader see how the open road looked from black people’s points of view. Interspersed with anecdotes and family stories, her history is authoritative, pungent, and personal. This volume is a ground-breaking roadmap of the black experience behind the wheel."
Thomas J. Sugrue
"With chronological sweep and intimate detail, Gretchen Sorin takes us on an unsettling road trip, showing us how African American travelers met with indignities, discrimination, and violence, and how they fought for their basic dignity. From the famous Green Book to black-run lakeside resorts, Sorin offers a powerful revision of the romance of roadside Americana."
Erin Blakemore
"The sweeping story of African Americans and automobiles—a tale of mobility and mobilization that helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement."
Kenneth T. Jackson
"Driving While Black is painful, poignant, and powerful. White America cannot imagine being unwelcomed and unwanted in stopping for a meal or a motel room on a long trip. But the fact is that this was for decades the harsh reality for millions of our fellow citizens. Through compelling and extensive interviews, illustrations, and evidence, Gretchen Sorin has meticulously documented yet another disturbing aspect of racism in our national life."
Bridgett M. Davis
"Make[s] powerfully clear the magnitude of the injustices and harrowing encounters endured by African-Americans traveling by ‘open’ road, as well as of their quiet acts of rebellion and protest, which went far beyond having to find alternative places to eat, sleep and buy gas…. Deeply researched… Driving While Black is more focused on the history of African-American car ownership and travel, exploring why both have been so important to African-American life.... A scholarly examination of the history of black mobility in this country from the antebellum period to now, including the ongoing quest by whites in power to deny or restrict that mobility."
Matt Gifford
"Driving While Black also chronicles the rise of car culture in tandem with rock ‘n’ roll music (Chuck Berry loved his Cadillacs), as well as the vast network of black-friendly establishments outlined in the popular Green Book. Feeling gassed up yet? Grab this book to-go and get to reading."
Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Michael Kleber-Diggs
"Driving While Black is a marvel. It is the work of a brilliant mind and a beautiful heart. Sorin, a professor at State University of New York at Albany, dazzles with plain language. She writes in a way that academics and laypersons will both admire. Sorin combines impeccable, exhaustive research and personal stories with a seamless elegance, somehow managing to hold the object under examination far enough away to consider it fully and close enough to really inhabit it."
Russell Contreras
"A riveting story on how the automobile opened up opportunities for blacks in the U.S…. In Sorin’s work, her prose and talent for turning examples into captivating stories prevent the book from being a mere sociological study of how black travel changed the nation. Instead, she blends her own family’s history, and those who experienced the black travel revolution, to make the book enjoyable and noteworthy since it shows how the changes ushered in civil rights."
Stephen L. Carter
"I’d never given much thought to how the ability of Black families to afford cars and go places influenced the course of history. Sorin weaves together gruesome tales of Black accident victims, the way Black affluence led corporations to try to profit from integration, and much more.... [A] tour de force."
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-20
How the automobile was both a machine of liberation and a potential peril for African Americans during the early decades of the 20th century—and beyond.
In addition to offering an eye-opening history of the terrible discrimination practiced routinely against African American drivers, Sorin (Director, Cooperstown Graduate Program/SUNY; co-author: Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, 2008, etc.) also discusses her own family's years of distress driving from New Jersey to North Carolina to visit relatives in the late 1950s. In the first few decades of the 20th century, owning a car demonstrated economic success, and that was certainly the case for a growing black middle class. Moreover, driving in one's own car meant not having to adhere to the humiliating Jim Crow laws regarding seating in public transportation. The right to move about among the states had always been considered a fundamental constitutional right—the 1920 Supreme Court case United States v. Wheeler assured the "free ingress and egress to and from any other state"—but that was "a right denied to African Americans." While white Americans took to the road merrily, writes the author, they were "comfortable denying their black countrymen not only the right to travel freely but also the ability to use public accommodations"—and this is key in Sorin's powerful story. When her family traveled south, they were sure to pack plenty of food and blankets for the children so that they did not have to stop at segregated restaurants and risk being denied a place to sleep. The author provides an in-depth look at the significance of Victor Green's (literally) lifesaving The Green Book—inspired by Jewish travel guides—first published in 1936 and expanded over the decades, which became the bible for African American drivers hoping to find amenable accommodations in gas and repair services, restaurants, hotels, etc. The author also discusses how the car became a vehicle integral to the civil rights movement.
A pleasing combination of terrific research and storytelling and engaging period visuals.
