Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor (review)

Antebellum travel inherently involved vulnerability. Outside the protective walls of secure homes, travelers placed themselves at the mercy of a litany of dangers: exploding railroad engines, fire-engulfed steamships, precarious suspension bridges, and capricious weather. For African Americans, however, travel entailed additional hazards: racialized threats of verbal vitriol, physical violence, and contested attempts to criminalize and curtail black mobility. It is this perilous world of African American mobility that historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor examines in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. Making use of print sources including slave narratives, interviews, letters, slave songs, sketches, abolitionist lectures, journals, and newspaper articles, Pryor contends that "colored travelers"—that is, free and financially capable people of color who resided in the antebellum North—believed that uninhibited travel constituted "a crucial component of U.S. citizenship" and that "by protesting against segregation, colored travelers identified the cars, compartments, and cabins of public conveyances as critical sites for equal rights protest" a century before Rosa Parks and the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 (p. 2).

Pryor focuses her analytical gaze on the methods of curtailment imposed on colored travelers. The author asserts that whites invoked the word nigger (I follow Pryor's deliberate lead here by avoiding the use of quotation marks around the word and the euphemism "n-word") to menace colored travelers and inhibit black movement. In fact, Pryor situates her etymology of nigger within a broader recognition of the burgeoning free black population of the North—a people increasingly accomplished, socially poised, and physically mobile. Indeed, it was this social and physical mobility that inflamed antiblack sentiment. Moreover, Pryor deftly delineates the polysemous usage of the word nigger. Rather than identify the word solely as a pernicious epithet fraught with terror, Pryor demonstrates that, contingent upon social class and context, African Americans used the word nigger as a vehicle for protest and as a signifier of social identity.

The milieu of colored travel was also constrained by insidious assumptions connoting black criminality. Whether codified in federal and state law or constructed in popular imagery of runaway black bodies, assumptions of criminality assailed free colored travelers even as they contested these assumptions regarding their ostensibly "illegal, suspicious, unconscionable, [and] inappropriate" movements (p. 45).

Colored travelers contested their purported criminality along several avenues. Physical spaces—specifically, nascent spaces of segregation such as Jim Crow railroad cars, cramped stagecoach quarters, and intimate steamship cabins—offered key sites for colored travelers to directly resist their white detractors. Other times, colored travelers' requests for official U.S. passports or transatlantic voyages toward Europe signified an explicit defiance of their subjugation and a reification of their identities as full-fledged gendered citizens. These examples of "black activist respectability," as Pryor terms them, included demonstrations of respectability and a fierce, physical defiance against Jim Crow segregation (p. 78). Ultimately, black activists suffered physical assaults and legal losses for their audacity, and yet Pryor maintains that black radical opposition underscored "freedom of mobility and equal access" to public conveyances as "central tenets of U.S. citizenship" (p. 102).

A minor detail is worth noting. Recognition of the nineteenth-century gender concepts of manhood or manliness could have refined and bolstered Pryor's contention that "manly" respectability and character functioned as strategic credentials to combat segregation (p. 88). Even so, this is a minor quibble since Pryor's anachronistic use of masculinity does not detract from the power of her central arguments.

Colored Travelers is highly recommended for readers interested in travel, transportation, antebellum America, racial language, free black Americans, African American studies, abolitionism, civil rights, race, and ethnicity. Pryor offers meaningful insights and an original analysis regarding the precariousness of black movement—a topic relevant to Americans in the twenty-first century.