Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson, who also conducted research in the Black belt during the 1930s and 1940s, was far less confident that the impact of the automobile was wholly democratic. An African American driver himself, he recorded the emergence of a new mode of traveling Black. “The automobile is a technological innovation which has disturbed many of the traditional patterns of association, caused some modification of established mores, and presented new problems of interracial etiquette,” wrote Johnson in 1943. Having conducted research in the Black belt for almost two decades, Johnson was able to trace these changing mores over time.
“At first,” he noted, “Negroes were expected to operate automobiles for whites, but not own them. Later ownership by Negroes was tolerated, but they were not supposed to own large or pretentious cars.” By the 1940s, he explained, “Negro ownership of any type of car is no longer questioned except in small towns.” But driving had its own racial etiquette, which had also changed over time. When Black drivers were almost exclusively chauffeurs, “they were identified with whites and accorded the rights of the road.” But as greater numbers of African American car owners hit the road, a new system evolved in which Blacks who drove their own cars “were expected to maintain their role as Negroes and in all cases, give right-of-way.”
In practical terms, the historians Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom explain, the racial right-of-way was “a rule of black deference to white drivers, especially white women drivers, without regard to which car arrived first at an intersection.” Passing white drivers was also problematic. “In some Southern communities,” James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1927, “it is a breach of social code for a colored man driving an automobile to pass a white.” In Mississippi, historian Neil R. McMillan writes, local custom “forbade black drivers to overtake white drivers on unpaved roads.” As one Black Mississippian understood this custom: “It’s against the law to pass a white man because the black man might stir up dust that would get on white folks.”
In some counties in the Deep South, “racial right-of-way” rules remained in place through the 1950s. Folklorist and activist Stetson Kennedy’s “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.,” first published in 1959, offered instructions for driving through “segregated territory” designed to help visitors follow these rules. “The only time you can safely claim right-of-way in segregated territory,” wrote Kennedy, “is when the other motorist is also nonwhite; while if you are white, you can claim not only legitimate right-of-way in encounters with white motorists, but also racial right-of-way over nonwhite motorists.”
Additionally, parking could also be subject to segregation: many southern towns reserved the parking spots on their main streets for whites, and some workplaces had segregated parking. At the Firestone tire plant in Memphis in 1941, Black workers could not park on the paved lot (the “white lot”) directly outside the plant. Instead, they had to be sure to park a little farther away on the gravel parking lot (the “Black lot”). “Even after the plant was integrated,” one Black worker remembered, “it was just unwritten law that you just didn’t do certain things” such as park in the “white lot.”