Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airports by Anke Ortlepp (review)

Anke Ortlepp, professor of British and American history at the University of Kassel, has written this slightly mistitled book about airports governed by de jure racial segregation almost exclusively in the American South. She adds to civil rights movement literature that until now has focused on Jim Crow railcars, tramways, and buses by outlining the rise of racially segregated southern airports in the years after World War II and the multiple lines of successful resistance to Jim Crow at these physical symbols of modernity and middle-class status.

In many ways, Ortlepp's account of airport desegregation conforms to the familiar narrative of racial segregation and resistance: Jim Crow occurred in physical spaces and drew resistance in the post–World War II United States from organized and individual activists as well as some travelers who were simply fed up. Resisters protested at the segregated facilities and sued airport authorities and concessionaires. Local officials and airport managers used states' rights arguments, subterfuge, intransigence, and prevarication to forestall these challenges to the "southern way of life" (p. 19). In other important ways, however, Ortlepp's story differs from those of other segregated facilities because almost all air passengers were interstate travelers, airplane seating itself was not segregated, and the federal government played a much more direct role in funding and regulating airports than it did bus terminals and lunch counters. Such complications exposed Jim Crow airports to federal regulations and Department of Justice desegregation lawsuits.

Ortlepp devotes two chapters to private resistance. Chapter 3 details direct action against Jim Crow airports that emerged in the wake of successful challenges to segregation in the 1950s. Led by the Congress of Racial Equality and local groups, these protests mirrored the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-ins that occurred at approximately the same time. Chapter 4 employs case studies to detail NAACP-assisted lawsuits aimed at airports and contractors, usually restaurants.

Although airport facilities were managed by municipalities and subject to local laws, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, succeeded by the Federal Aviation Agency, oversaw the airlines that used the terminals and provided funding to construct them. Thus, civil rights advocates pursued changes through federal regulations and even federal legislation. Ortlepp follows the twists and turns of multiple federal antisegregation actions: Michigan congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr.'s 1955 airport survey; regulatory interpretation; and attempts by senators in the 1960s, including Jacob K. Javits of New York, to secure racial equality through the Federal Airport Act, committee investigations, and amendments to appropriations bills.

More compelling and successful in securing racial equity were lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division against airports that used Federal-Aid Airport Program funds to build illegally segregated facilities or that ignored court orders in private suits. Ortlepp examines federal suits against Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, but her treatment of these cases is uneven. She discusses the first three in satisfying detail but gives Shreveport very short shrift, an odd oversight as she twice notes that Shreveport's was the last U.S. airport to desegregate.

Ortlepp opens a particularly interesting line of inquiry by examining the physicality of Jim Crow airport facilities through the lens of spatial analysis. Although she does well in analyzing segregated airports, she misses an opportunity to provide a sufficiently thorough theoretical or historiographical foundation so that scholars may apply her ideas to other segregated spaces.

Nevertheless, Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airportsis an important and accessible book that examines resistance to Jim Crow in an area that has escaped scholarly attention. At the same time, Ortlepp has left enough intriguing traces for other historians to extend her work.