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.