Q: What made you decide to delve into this topic?
One of the early essays I wrote about it was about why Black people couldn’t leave New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. In it, I talked about modern day transportation inequalities, like the level of car ownership, the ways in which no provisions are made in the case of disasters. No provisions were made for people without cars during Katrina.
In working on the book, I went backwards in time. I ended up starting in the antebellum era because I found that segregation on transportation starts with the advent of various forms of public transportation like railroads, stagecoaches, and steamships.
Q: Was there anything you discovered in researching this book that took you by surprise?
It took me a long time to understand why there were always so many stories about train crashes in Black newspapers, taking note of how many people died in these crashes. It turns out that the Jim Crow cars would ride right behind the engine throughout their history. As railroads began to replace most passenger cars with all metal cars, they used the oldest cars for Jim Crow cars, so by the turn of the century the Jim Crow car was often the only wooden car on the train. When there were crashes they would just collapse, and say if you had 100 deaths at least 70% of them would be the Black people in the Jim Crow cars and most of the rest would be the engineer and the conductor and the other railroad workers, who often traveled in the Jim Crow cars.
I was surprised to learn about airport segregation. I didn’t know that there had been Jim Crow bathrooms and restaurants in airports, and I was able to find evidence of informal segregation actually in the air itself. When I started writing a chapter on planes, I wasn’t sure whether I would ever actually have enough information to write.
I was fascinated by discussions of a racial right of way in the segregated South, where when cars become common there’s some idea that Black people are going to have to defer to white people on the road. It doesn’t actually work very well. If you stood at a stop sign waiting for every single white person to pass, then white person behind you wouldn’t be very happy. It wasn’t terribly viable.
Q: Why is it important to look at the topic right now?
The pandemic has further complicated travel. Before the pandemic when more people were still traveling to work, transportation inequalities were just getting worse and worse. The lack of commitment to public transportation would mean that everyone who doesn’t have a car is a second-class citizen. And the policing of Black people driving cars is an ongoing problem.