Driving while Black: White control over Black mobility continues
9th August 2021 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
The Center for African and African American Studies’ (CAAAS) annual Summer 2021 program celebrates AYA, the African Adinkra symbol of endurance and resourcefulness.
The CAAAS at Southern University in New Orleans offers interactive programming on African Americans’ topics and issues. The “Traveling While Black” film series, dialogue, and exhibition are cosponsored by CAAAS, under the direction of Dr. Clyde Robertson, and the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge, directed by Rodneyna Hart.
In July, CAAAS screened “Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America,” a documentary film by Dr. Gretchen Sorin and Ric Burns. The film’s directors trace the history of African-American mobility and challenges faced by African Americans who attempted to drive freely in America.
The film is an adaptation of Dr. Sorin’s book. Sorin is a historian, author and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at SUNY. Burns is an internationally known filmmaker and founder of Steeplechase Films.
Four historians reflect on racism on the road and the liberating benefits of having personal vehicles through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, and today in the film.
“Mobility is essential to freedom. Freedom, discovery. I think the automobile is emblematic of the importance and the value of mobility in a free society. It (film) goes beyond mobility and allows us to understand the way African Americans have moved forward in this country and the way African Americans have been pushed back,” says Sorin.
“I think the idea of driving while Black is a helpful way to understand that this form of mobility that Americans have revered and enjoyed and have romanticized is part of America iconography; and what it means to be American is to take to the road, to have this great expanse of highway and to make memories with your family,” Allyson Hobbs explains.
Hobbs is an associate professor of United States History and director of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. “I think the notion of driving while Black reminds us, that’s not available to all Americans.”
“Driving while Black was always unsafe,” another historian adds. “There are still so many dangers. The ability to move freely. We live in a country where that’s never been everybody’s right.”
“We’re exploring the phenomena known as DRIVING WHILE BLACK through the prism of the powerful documentary, ‘Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America,’” CAAAS Director Dr. Clyde Robertson explained.
“The panelists will probe the duality of freedom and race-based danger to which automobile travel exposed African Americans. We will juxtapose how the automobile allowed African Americans to flee the Jim Crow South in pursuit of better opportunities but also led to some of them being harangued, harassed, and killed by law enforcement officials after, and sometimes before, reaching their destinations,” Dr. Robertson explained.
Robertson says SUNO was the first university invited to screen the film.
“Rodney King, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Rodney Greene, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Duante Wright are recent examples of African Americans whose freedom of mobility was challenged, and, in some of the cases, lives were taken by law enforcement officers,” Robertson continued.
New Orleans is in the documentary, which aired on PBS in 2020. Legendary Chef Leah Chase speaks of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant as a haven for civil rights organizers. Scenes of Claiborne Avenue and the interstate loom large. Nineteenth-century photos and earlier depict African Americans in and or near automobiles.
Mobility is changing. Electric cars, push-button ignition, self-parking cars and automatic danger warnings signal the evolution of the automobile. Indeed, future vehicles will drive themselves, whether by magnetism or remote control and maybe even fly. Space travelers, billionaires Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, rode to the edge of space in personal aircraft.
President Biden’s commitment to the proliferation of electric cars also portends well for America’s competition with other nations to corner the market on clean energy.
Additionally, coronavirus’ impact on travel and mobility makes traveling by automobile a preferred mode of transportation. Some Americans are choosing to travel by car rather than crowded modes of transportation.
However, most Black Americans know that getting behind the wheel of a car is a death-defying act. Unlike other Americans who cruise to their destination, Black Americans must proceed with caution. They must be ready, at all times, for a possible traffic stop by law enforcement officers, which can go wrong without provocation.
The mobility of Black Americans has historically been challenged and controlled by authoritarian whites. “Before the Revolutionary War, slaves confined to homes or agricultural plantations, or whose movements were limited by curfews, could be required to furnish written evidence their owner had granted an exemption to permit their free movement,” authors Valerie Cunningham and Mark J. Sammons wrote in “Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage.”
For example, the New Hampshire Assembly in 1714 passed “An Act To Prevent Disorders In The Night”: “Whereas great disorders, insolencies and burglaries are oft times raised and committed in the night time by Indian, Negro, and Molatto Servants and Slaves to the Disquiet and hurt of her Majesty, No Indian, Negro, or Molatto is to be from Home after 9 o’clock.” Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s province of New-Hampshire, in New England: With sundry acts of Parliament. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Daniel Fowle. 1759.
“Internal passports were required for African Americans in the southern slave states before the American Civil War. For example, an authenticated internal passport dated 1815 was presented to Massachusetts citizen George Barker to allow him to freely travel as a free Black man to visit relatives in slave states,” according to Celebrating Black Americana, a documentary that aired on PBS.
Angela A. Allen-Bell, Esq., associate professor at the Southern University Law Center, moderated the discussion following the film. Panelists included Sorin, Burns, State Representative Edmond Jordan, Esq. and Susan Hutson, Esq., the Independent Police Monitor and candidate for Orleans Parish Sheriff, rounded out the panel.
Upcoming activities in the “Traveling While Black” series include more films and talks at the Capitol Park Museum:
The “Negro Motorist Green Book: Guidebook to Freedom,” with a first-hand narrative by Mr. Wilkin Jones, will screen on August 28; “Dialogue on Race in Louisiana,” featuring Maxine Crump (registration required through Capitol Park Museum website) and “The Green Book” movie, moderated by Kathy Hambrick, screens on September 9; and from August 21 until November 14, 2021, the Negro Motorist Green Book Exhibition will be open to the public at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
This article originally published in the August 9, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
