Lucidly written and generously illustrated with photos and artifacts, this rigorous and entertaining history deserves a wide readership. 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. 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. 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.

You can measure the driving distance between two cities based on actual turn-by-turn directions. 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. Travelmath provides driving information to help you plan a road trip. Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, directed by historian Gretchen Sorin and director Ric Burns (younger brother of Ken Burns) premieres tonight on PBS, and the.

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.

Driving while black book