Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, by Mia Bay

Mia Bay’s deeply researched, wonderfully written, and timely book, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, touches on issues of identity, law, mobility, and race , all of which will be central to the way we approach our writing this semester. Bay’s focus is on the severe and dehumanizing strictures that were placed on Black Americans who attempted (especially) interstate travel in the Jim Crow South. Though this is not just a book about a location (“the south”) since we know that Jim Crow existed in the north as well. Neither is it a book that is just about the time of Jim Crow, but instead Bay shows how in many ways Jim Crow’s still haunts us today. Though masked and renamed, it still works to restrict the mobility of black bodies. It is for this reason, for example, that Michelle Alexander calls mass incarceration “the new Jim Crow.”

The legal framework for Jim Crow begins in many accounts with the Supreme Court Case Plessy Vs. Ferguson (1896), which institutionalized the concept of “separate but equal,” though these practices were already widespread in both the north and south in the wake of Emancipation. As Bay reminds us, the case was brought about because of travel, through the actions of Homer Plessy who deliberately refused to abide by Louisiana’s “Separate Car Act” that governed the state’s railroads. In other words, Plessy’s was a direct action, meant to test the law and bring attention to these conditions. It was, in Bay’s reading, an act of protest. For Bay, Black protest and Black travel are inextricably bound. She discusses not only the Freedom Riders, for example, but the individuals and organizations that preceded them and the actions they inspired, in order to sketch out a much more detailed genealogy of Black protest.

Enforced by violence and upheld by law, the limits placed on “Traveling Black” coincided with what in other frameworks and perspectives is seen as the high point of travel. And as we consider our own stories of movement and travel, we need to bear in mind the ways in which travel is never a neutral activity, but depends very much on who we are.

Bay’s study promises to have a transformative impact on travel studies. The creation, perpetuation, and survival of Jim Crow was due time and again to laws surrounding black travel. Law is the main engine of Jim Crow, never the tool for its elimination. Bay’s book shows us the power and potential of Critical Race Theory and Black protests movements, and, frankly, reading Bay’s book explains why so many use CRT today as a fear tactic: CRT shows us not just who we were or how we got here, but who we are right now, barely a year after the George Floyd protests.