Taylor, like Sorin, focuses on the racism of white commerce and celebrates “black travelers, armed with the Green Book,” who used their cars as “a formidable tool that pushed the pendulum of equality forward.” At the same time, because it cannot ignore the current crisis of over-policing and mass incarceration, Overground Railroad wavers between commending and qualifying the efforts of black motorists and businesses. Left unexplained in both Overground Railroad and Driving While Black is what happened after the midcentury struggle for equal access to public accommodations. After the promise of the Sixties, how did American society end the century with racial inequality even more entrenched, especially in the criminal justice system?
By focusing on the people who pursued equality in their cars and with their roadside businesses, Sorin and Taylor miss a larger story about the social and legal changes wrought by the automobile that ultimately led to the injustices cited at the end of their books, which formal equality under the law could not possibly have addressed. The mass production of cars facilitated the development of modern policing, with individual officers wielding unprecedented power in ways that further perpetuated systemic racism.
Cars were not just freedom machines; they were also dangerous. Consequently, they were extensively regulated from their earliest years. In the 1920s and 1930s, local governments throughout the country enlarged and professionalized their police forces and expanded the discretion of individual officers to stop motorists and search their cars for safety violations and, soon, for contraband as well. Because most drivers violated traffic laws—at some point, nearly everyone is guilty of speeding, one of the leading causes of car accidents—the police came to exercise an inordinate amount of discretionary authority to decide which cars to pull over and which cars to search. The ubiquity of traffic violations created nearly limitless pretexts for policing. Enforcement in the War on Drugs, which increased during the mid-1980s, institutionalized pretextual traffic stops, which targeted drivers of color and compounded existing inequality in the justice system.
The broad coalition of activists in the 1960s didn’t follow their civil rights achievements with a widespread movement to reform policing. While poor black Americans became mired in the resistance to school desegregation orders or were struggling for greater welfare benefits during the 1970s economic downturn, the middle class turned its attention to the War on Crime amid that decade’s surge in gun violence. A new politics of respectability emerged, this time extolling drug-free and crime-free lives.
