Colored travelers :

Title:

Colored travelers : mobility and the fight for citizenship before the Civil War / Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor.

Personal Author:

Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur,

Call Number:

323.1196 P9734

ISBN:

9781469628578

Physical Description:

xv, 218 pages ; 25 cm.

Series:

The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture

Series Title:

John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture.

Summary:

"Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers," activists who relied on steamships, stagecoaches, and railroads to expand their networks and to fight slavery and racism. This book tells the story of how the basic act of traveling emerged as a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the Civil War"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

African Americans -- Travel -- United States.

African Americans -- Civil rights -- History -- 19th century.

Freedom of movement -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

Travel restrictions -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Social conditions -- 19th century.

Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016]

Format:

Books

First Title value, for Searching:

Colored travelers :

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Summary

Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers," activists who relied on steamships, stagecoaches, and railroads to expand their networks and to fight slavery and racism. They refused to ride in "Jim Crow" railroad cars, fought for the right to hold a U.S. passport (and citizenship), and during their transatlantic voyages, demonstrated their radical abolitionism. By focusing on the myriad strategies of black protest, including the assertions of gendered freedom and citizenship, this book tells the story of how the basic act of traveling emerged as a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the Civil War.

Drawing on exhaustive research from U.S. and British newspapers, journals, narratives, and letters, as well as firsthand accounts of such figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown, Pryor illustrates how, in the quest for citizenship, colored travelers constructed ideas about respectability and challenged racist ideologies that made black mobility a crime.

Author Notes

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is currently assistant professor of history at Smith College, USA.

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

In this sprawling but engaging volume, historian Anbinder (George Washington Univ.) largely delivers on the challenge of fully surveying the history of immigration to New York City, a subject never addressed to this extent. Unlike many histories of New York immigration, this book begins with early Dutch settlement and British colonial years before moving to more familiar territory. Hampered by a paucity of sources, the early chapters lack the fast-paced narrative found in the rest of the book, where the story of immigration in the creation of the modern metropolis comes fully alive. Anbinder periodically employs more intimate personal stories to add life to an occasionally broadly drawn account. The heart of the book arrives in chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries, when masses of immigrants repeated and remade patterns of settlement, work, and challenges of previous generations of newcomers. Readers unfamiliar with the many neighborhoods of New York's boroughs are aided by helpful maps. While the role of religion in immigrant communities seems underappreciated, recurring outbreaks of anti-immigrant resistance get notable attention. Because immigration to New York is ongoing, the end of the book naturally merges with current issues, many of which mirror earlier struggles. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. --Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Library Journal Review

In this seminal work, Pryor (history, Smith Coll.) reveals how antebellum African Americans, cognizant of the bond between physical mobility and citizenship, challenged their segregation on public conveyances. Readers are reminded that aboard such types of transport as stagecoaches, trolleys, railroads, and vessels, divided space policies represented the earliest guidelines for racial segregation in America. Relying on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, the author demonstrates how despite the deployment of vile Jim Crow railroad cars, passport denials, and abusive treatment on Atlantic crossings, activist travelers such as Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, and William Wells Brown became a reckoning force to oppose the white majority notion that their rightful mobility was unlawful. Pryor concludes: "In their quest for inclusion and citizenship, colored travelers redefined segregation as a crime, reframed ideas about what constituted respectable behavior, took on the federal government, shaped definitions of freedom, and probably most importantly, no matter what the risks, they traveled anyway." VERDICT An original contribution to historiography of the 19th century, this work will engage everyone from legal scholars to general readers, and is especially recommended to those interested in the antebellum era and -African American history.-John Carver -Edwards, -formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.