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Abstract:
This essay examines the perils, pleasures, opportunities, and political significance of African-American automobility as documented in Travelguide (Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation)and The Negro Motorist Green Book, midcentury guidebooks which directed black drivers to hospitable roadside lodging, restaurants, and mechanical assistance. These texts offer a multifaceted, often contradictory rhetoric of communal racial uplift and liberal individualism figured around the practice of driving. The years of their publication, 1936-1957, saw tremendous volatility in American race relations, as World War II and the Cold war made the national doctrine of white supremacy a global political liability. It was in this historical context that African Americans' desire and fitness for citizenship were tethered to and divined in their participation in automobility-a practice that fused self-determination and self-representation, mobility, consumption, and social encounter.
The rhetorical strategies of these guidebooks complemented a particular strain of liberal antiracism necessitated and lubricated by the cold war, facilitated by the "nationalization" of postwar politics and economics, and performed in increasingly standardized public spaces. One of these spaces was the Interstate highway, which, set apart from and above the landscape and local culture through which it cut, provided an opportunity for the obscuring of one's identity from the scrutiny of others. The new interstate highway, I argue, enabled the African-American driver to pass as the blank liberal subject, and to effect, under certain circumstances, the privatist withdrawal that has been such an extravagant and problematic characteristic of American citizenship.
Merging his Ford Model T with the traffic stream of E. L. Doctorow's peripatetic 1974 novel Ragtime, the African American pianist Coalhouse Walker is involved in a collision of sorts, one that will eventually prove fatal. En route to New York City after a visit with his fiancée on Long Island, Walker is humiliated by the Irish American firemen of the Emerald Isle Engine brigade, to whom the sight of an urbane black man at the wheel of a new car is an intolerable affront. After denying Walker passage on the public road in front of the firehouse, the firemen vandalize and destroy his Model T. When his appeals for redress are dismissed by local authorities, and when his fiancée is killed while attempting to elicit aid from a politician, Walker responds with...