Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America

is to take to the road.

Mobility is essential freedom.

Discovery, freedom.

- That notion of driving while black reminds us

that that's not available to all Americans.

To be able to move freely,

we live in a country

where it's never been everybody's right.

- There are still so many dangers.

Officer, I'm locking my car.

- We have to engage history with a kind of brutal honesty.

- - "Good roadsle beckon to you and me,

daily we grow more motor-wise.

The nomad in the poorest and the mightiest of us,

sends us behind the wheel -

north, south, east, and west -

in answer to the call of the road.

It's mighty good to be the skipper of a change,

and pilot our craft whither and when we will.

We feel like Vikings.

What if our craft is blunt of nose,

and limited of power, and our sea is macadamized;

it's food for the spirit

to just give the old railroad Jim Crow the laugh.

Nevertheless, there is still a small cloud

that stands between us and complete motor-travel freedom.

On the trail, this cloud rarely troubles us in the mornings,

but as the afternoon wears on

it casts a shadow of apprehension to our hearts.

'Where, ' it asks us, 'will you stay tonight?'

An innocent enough question;

to our Nordic friends, of no consequence.

But to you and me,

what a peace-destroying world of potentiality."

Alfred Edgar Smith 1933.

- Mobility is essential to freedom.

I think the automobile is emblematic

of the importance and the value

of mobility in a free society.

But, it also goes beyond mobility

and it allows us to understand

the way that African Americans

have moved forward in this country

and the way that AfricanAmericans have been pushed back.

- Could I uh see some ID please, sir?

For what?

- I need to see your driver's license

and registration.

For what?

Let me start out by saying:

driving while Black was always unsafe.

Yet, by the same token,

millions of African Americans did it.

- I think the idea of driving while Black

is a really helpful way to understand

that this form of mobility that Americans have revered,

and have enjoyed, and have romanticized, you know,

it's sort of part of, kind of, American iconography,

and what it means to be American,

is to take to the road,

to have this great expanse of the highway,

and to make memories with your family.

And I think that the notion of driving while Black

reminds us that that's not available to all Americans.

- For me, the term Driving While Black

isn't just a slogan,

it's not just part of our political rhetoric,

it's not just something we say to remind ourselves

of the persistence of racism in the United States.

It's a very personal experience of remembering, in fact,

the anxiety, the fear.

- I think it's really, really tough

for the majority of Americans to begin to even understand

the gut wrenching horror

that is driving in a racist society.

- Well you know Driving While Black

is a very interesting concept

and it entails so much more

than the actual driving while Black.

It's living while Black. Sleeping while Black.

Eating while Black. Moving while Black.

And so when we start talking about the brutal restrictions

on black movement in this country,

well that's a long history.

That goes all the way back to day one.

You have to get to the root of it.

You know, where's the root of it?

I think for African Americans,

any story about mobility really begins 400 years ago.

I think it's really important

to look at the longer history of race, space, and mobility,

because if we look to the past,

we can really see how travel or mobility

for African Americans has really been circumscribed.

So if we think about, you know, the first Africans

who came to the colonies through the Middle Passage

and on slave ships,

think about the trauma and the terror and the violence

of that form of forced mobility.

- If you just go back to those roots -

back to the era of slavery -

a chance to move around

was very much regulated and controlled

by those who were slave owners

over people who were enslaved.

- I think the extraction of black people's labor,

the use of black people's bodies,

their capacity to produce and to generate wealth

required, in fact, restrictions upon their ability to move.

And so much of American history, so much of American law,

is actually focused on policing that movement,

policing that mobility.

- Many enslaved Africans, never left a one-mile area

in their entire life, because they were constrained

to that plantation or that farm.

- We were slaves. We belonged to people.

Now I couldn't go from here across the street

without I have a note, or something from my master.

And if I had that pass, I could go wherever he sent me.

- The fact that you had to get a pass

to go from one plantation to another.

And if you didn't have that pass

you were likely to be stopped by slave patrols

and they were given permission to beat you

and to mistreat you, for having the audacity

to think that you could travel on your own.

- So we can talk about very, very early on,

you know, the imposition.

You know, the limitations that's imposed on Black life.

"You're not allowed to go beyond this point."

So right away you have some elements of racial profiling

from the very beginning of the Black experience in America.

- One of the things that I think is so interesting

is how policing developed in the south.

Policing starts with slave catchers.

These are men who are part of the community

who go around at night to make sure that enslaved people

are not leaving their plantations,

but they're also there to terrorize and to intimidate.

- The slave patrols of the old south

are there to control Black people's movements,

to keep slaves from moving off plantations,

to limit their ability to seek and find freedom

by crossing boundaries and borders

that they're not intended to cross.

And it's not a regional problem.

In the Northern states, in places like New York City,

there were regulations

on black people moving about in the nighttime.

And colonial New York, and 18th century,

19th century New York went to, in fact, great lengths

to police the movement of black people.

"I am unable to travel

in any part of this country

without calling forth illustrations

of the dark spirit of slavery at every step."

Frederick Douglass, 1852.

Many enslaved Africans,

like Frederick Douglass, stole themselves from slavery,

and from there, walked to a free state.

The Underground Railroad was a very loose network

of African Americans and white Americans

who helped fugitive slaves escape, where they could

disappear into a Black neighborhood

or perhaps working their way to Canada.

- The repercussions for the lack of success are terrible.

Deciding to run away could mean you might be beaten,

you might be sent further South, separated from family.

All for the belief that freedom of movement -

a chance to get to a better place - is worth the risk;

is worth all the issues that come with that.

- The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850.

And it criminalized those people

who were supporting African Americans

on the Underground Railroad, because the law of the land

was that a slave had to be returned to their master.

- Now you see, that, that was in slavery time.

I recollect just as well, and he'd bring back

whole lot the colored people.

And they brought them hound in and brought three niggas

with them hound, runaway niggas,

you know, caught in the wood.

And they, right, right across, right at the creek there,

they take them niggas and put them on,

and put them on a log lay them down and fasten them.

And whup them.

You hear them niggas hollering and praying on them logs.

And there was a nigga bring them in.

Then they take them out down there and put them in jail.

- The Fugitive Slave Act was designed as an act

that would appease the southern states

and keep them from leaving the Union.

But instead of appeasing the southern states,

it really demonstrated to many people in the North,

how they were complicit in slavery.

They watched, as African Americans

were dragged from homes,

were put into jails,

they were being taken back into slavery.

They saw the suffering of these people.