Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

Traveling Black tells the story of what it was like to travel in Jim Crow cars, ride at the back of the bus, and navigate a myriad of discriminatory travel accommodations—from whites-only service stations to segregated airline terminals. A character-driven account of the many humiliations experienced by black travelers, as well their sustained battle secure the right to travel freely, it places the right to unrestricted mobility at the center of the  twentieth-century black freedom struggle. 

Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history, whose publications include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021). 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.