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

When Frederick Douglass and other nineteenth-century black residents of the United States voyaged between cities, they referred to themselves as "colored travelers." This term, which Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor uses as the title of her book, addresses the racialized experience of black mobility and transportation technologies in the nineteenth century. Stordeur Pryor compellingly argues that blacks connected equal access to public transportation space with the rights of citizenship. Travel, especially because of technological changes that occurred between 1790 and 1860, "was a vital mechanism for citizenship" (p. 45). The development of segregation in the early 1800s led to equal rights conflicts over access to transportation technologies and citizenship. This fight over mobility and citizenship that occurred before the Civil War had implications for subsequent civil rights conflicts. Stordeur Pryor explains that nineteenth-century black activism and struggles for access to transportation technologies, in the face of Jim Crow segregation, "birthed, shaped, and cultivated the equal rights movement in the United States" (p. 1).

Colored Travelers begins with an extended etymology of the N-word, showing how the tortured and contingent meaning of the term "emerged as a weapon of racial containment" in the early nineteenth century; a term of verbal violence against black social and geographic mobility (pp. 11, 14). From here, Stordeur Pryor organizes the book spatially, radiating outward from home to international travel, addressing the struggles over racially organized practices on local public vehicles, limited mobility throughout the United States, federal policies restricting passports to black travelers, and, finally, the racially liminal territory of transatlantic ships whose captains were influenced by both discrimination in the United States and growing egalitarianism in Europe. These various modes of transportation work as case studies, highlighting black activism, protest, and legal actions in response to segregated transportation before the Civil War.

The development of Jim Crow segregation is critical to the analysis in Colored Travelers. Jim Crow, the term applied to post–Civil War segregation, began as blackface minstrel shows in the early 1830s and, according to Stordeur Pryor's research, was established as a spatial practice on Massachusetts railroads beginning in 1838. Spatial segregation was a white response to emancipation, and "whites most often used racial segregation as a weapon against free rather than enslaved people" (p. 63). Stordeur Pryor explains: "As black people became free, white northerners fashioned racial boundaries in public space, color lines designed to maintain white supremacy. Public vehicles were ripe settings for this contest over race, space, and mobility" (p. 44). Conductors confined black passengers to designated Jim Crow cars, segregating the black and white passengers (pp. 76–77, 90). Segregation of nineteenth-century transportation technology developed as a method of social control in response to emancipation. Whites criminalized black mobility as they invented the interiors of public vehicles as white spaces, using both the law and vigilantism to guard these spaces. Black activists responded by crossing the thresholds of spaces labeled white as a front line in the struggle for equal rights, liberty, and citizenship. Legal confrontations in the courts frequently ensued. Blacks and whites used transportation spaces to negotiate the meaning of freedom and the boundaries of their racial categories.

Colored Travelers adds to and pushes beyond a growing literature on the history of race and transportation. While books like Highway Robbery (2004), edited by Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres; Blair Murphy Kelley's Right to Ride (2010), and Theodore Kornweibel's Railroads in the African American Experience (2010) all highlight transportation racism and activists fighting for equality, Stordeur Pryor connects the development of transportation segregation and struggles for equality to larger notions of liberty and citizenship in the United States. While Colored Travelers addresses the links between race, mobility, equal rights, and citizenship, it also explores how transportation technologies were part of the longer development of racial practices that emphasize surveillance, criminalization, and the...