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

This fascinating study covers the history of the rise and fall of segregated airports in the U. S. South from the late 1940s to the early '60s. Ortlepp "conceives of airport terminals as sites of conflict—as territories of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities in postwar America" (10). For civil rights activists, but also for African American travelers trying merely to exercise their citizenship and consumer status, "the airport terminal was new protest territory" (37). Tracing a series of legal cases and drawing on oral histories and government documents, Ortlepp paints a vivid picture of how civil rights debates played out inconsistently (and often indirectly) around the planning, construction, and operation of new terminals throughout the Southern United States in the postwar period.

Jim Crow Terminals complicates any easy linear notion of social progress with regard to the development of commercial air travel. The unfair treatment of passengers based on their skin color—enforced around airport restaurants, waiting areas, restrooms, and drinking fountains—reveals how local customs and ingrained political attitudes ensnared and tarnished the promises of smooth transit by air. The snapshots of mistreatment and racialized Othering are consistent with other more familiar civil rights flashpoints (such as buses), but the built environment of the airport exposes an intriguing irony. While white supremacists saw airports as more or less natural extensions of their local regions (and thereby places in which to automatically maintain segregated practices), zooming out slightly showed airports in their connective capacity to be exploding parochial regionalisms in favor of a more inclusive modernity. Court cases concerning the integration of these terminals were always necessarily (eventually) taking this zoomed out view—which was precisely what air travel was facilitating more broadly, as the very creation of the FAA in 1958 suggests. So Ortlepp offers the compelling observation that "emotionally, legally, and practically, the airport terminal was one of the weakest bastions of southern white resistance" (137). While Southern white supremacists may have assumed that airport construction projects were a way to double down on and bolster their (Southern) identity (including segregation), in fact the modern airport terminal became a significant part of the unraveling of such practices.

One of the most curious minor details in Jim Crow Terminals is the reoccurring function of the delay. Numerous cases cited in the book wherein a traveler is either denied service or offered a separate dining area are triggered by the occasion of a delayed flight: "When the return flight of her business trip from New York to Washington was delayed…" (16); "Faced with a delay…" (39); "While waiting for a delayed flight…" (67); "While waiting for his delayed connecting flight…" (69). Each of these unplanned, extra temporalities at an airport results in an altercation or confrontation in which segregation is implemented—and then called out. In other words, one of the banes of air travel—the dreaded delay—in a bizarre way ends up aiding the desegregation of Jim Crow terminals. Hiding in plain sight here is a quite radical reconceptualization of one of modernity's most annoying low-grade glitches: time to kill becomes time for social justice.

Toward the end of the book, Ortlepp discusses how the desegregation of the Jim Crow terminals depended on the acceptance of a "broad definition of 'air carrier,' which included airports and all necessary supportive services to air commerce" (129). Not only were the physical realities of these particular airports being changed—signs saying "WHITE" and "COLORED" removed; separate seating areas in restaurants rendered illegal—but air travel itself was undergoing a conceptual shift, spreading out into seemingly detached parts of modern life. One wonders if the imprecision of "all necessary support services" was lost on the lawmakers, or if the capaciousness of this phrase was intentionally strategic. As if to say there is no such thing as a simple "terminal" where things end when it comes to civil rights. Everywhere, concourses instead.

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