From Slavery to Civil Rights: On the Streetcars of New Orleans, 1830s–Present by Hilary Mc Laughlin-Stonham (review)

From Slavery to Civil Rights: On the Streetcars of New Orleans, 1830s–Present provides a detailed history of streetcar segregation in New Orleans. It aims to illuminate "the origins and motivation for segregation laws" and the extent to which "de facto behaviour met de jure policy" (pp. 1, 197). Hilary Mc Laughlin-Stonham asserts that interactions on streetcars "mirrored racial relations in the city" and shows how streetcars broke from broader trends of segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 1). The author examines the political culture that led to the creation of segregation laws in Louisiana, the degree of public enforcement and acceptance of segregation on streetcars, and efforts to prevent this segregation. The book begins in the 1830s, charting the history of "the longest-running streetcar system in the world" through the early 1960s, with an epilogue that discusses New Orleans streetcars in the present (p. 201). Whereas previous scholarship has established the significance of streetcars and buses as symbols of race relations writ large, considered daily interactions in these spaces, studied the extent of resistance to segregated vehicles, and probed the class dimensions of Black protest, this author focuses on the legal and political history of segregating streetcars.

An exploration of legal rights and degrees of economic opportunity among free people of color and enslaved people provides a background of race relations in New Orleans for Mc Laughlin-Stonham to assert that whites segregated public conveyances as a visual marker to indicate white superiority in a society in which racial lines "remained blurred" in the antebellum period (p. 45). The author relates the contested nature of streetcar travel in New Orleans from the 1860s (when its streetcar lines were expanded and began to include separate "Star Cars" for Black passengers, who were excluded from the regular streetcars) to the turn of the twentieth century (when Louisiana legally segregated mass transit) (p. 25). In May 1867, creoles of color and middle-class Black people formed a "united front" (p. 101). They successfully protested and demanded equal access to the city's streetcars and an end to Star Cars, which led the mayor to threaten arrest of any white passengers who attempted to prevent Black passengers from entering the cars. Streetcars remained legally integrated throughout Reconstruction and were also generally integrated in practice, despite railroads and steamboats openly segregating.

One of the book's strengths is its examination of why New Orleans streetcars remained integrated from 1867 until 1902, while white lawmakers imposed segregation in virtually all other spaces during the 1880s and 1890s. There briefly remained a "fluid space" in New Orleans society during which light-skinned Black passengers were frequently permitted to sit in the white section (p. 123). However, the interwar era saw greater white compliance with streetcar segregation, and white streetcar drivers and conductors took on increasingly prominent roles in ensuring segregated seating. By the 1930s, "streetcar conductors came to embody the Jim Crow enforcement of rigid segregation" (p. 198). After Black leaders filed a lawsuit, the city legally desegregated streetcars in 1958 without significant opposition, but according to Mc Laughlin-Stonham, true integration of the streetcars came in 1961 when the streetcar company began employing Black conductors and drivers.

The author uses a strong primary source base of newspapers, court cases, and arrest records, intermittently acknowledging the challenge of using legal documents to determine public compliance with segregation statutes. These sources bolster her historiographical contribution by emphasizing the role of conductors and drivers in establishing degrees of segregation in vehicles. Greater consideration of the insights of excellent existing scholarship on race and public transit, including in New Orleans, might have allowed the author to develop her own analysis more sharply.