Driving While Black conveys the visceral fear of Black motorists, who traveled with the fear that if they needed food, gas, or lodging, there was no guarantee that people would welcome them as customers. The documentary presents a revealing story of how car ownership was a sign of middle-class achievement and a way of marking social progress, especially for those African Americans returning to the South.īut though these events brought the promise of mobility closer for African Americans, it created more hazards and threats to liberty and life.
Therefore, the advent of personal car ownership-introduced by auto magnate Henry Ford, who held racist and anti-Semitic views-also provided opportunities for advancement and middle-class wages for Black Americans who moved to Detroit during the Great Migration in the early 20th century. They traveled in the back of buses or in the parts of trains covered with soot, only to arrive at stations with separate facilities and food options. Politicians purposively designed Jim Crow laws to diminish the dignity of Black Americans.
This advances Driving While Black to an era more familiar to most: the 20th century and the peak of racial segregation.
But by 1877, Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The documentary describes the promise of Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and how, for a time, we achieved some advances toward freedom and justice. Vagrancy laws, loitering laws, and even the seemingly innocuous query “where are you going?” are linked to the premise that White agents of the state have the ability to control the movement of Black people, at any time, for any reason. These consequences, levied by slave-catchers eventually transformed into American policing: state-sanctioned control over Black people and their ability to travel. I couldn’t go across the street without a note from my master.” The documentary vividly recounts the testimony of Fountain Hughes, a formerly enslaved man, in a recording from 1949: “We were slaves… we belonged to people. Chattel slavery demanded control over Black bodies and limited mobility and travel for enslaved people. Visually stunning, with animated graphics, documents, still images, and video, Driving While Black spins a narrative of the constraints of mobility and travel, all the way back to 1619 when slavers captured the first Africans and transported them via the Middle Passage to Jamestown, Virginia. The central premise of Driving While Black is that while mobility and travel, exemplified by the automobile, has represented freedom and liberty for White Americans, the reality for Black Americans is fraught with complexity. It allows us to understand how African Americans have moved forward in this society, and the ways this society have held them back.
DRIVING WHILE BLACK BOOK FREE
The automobile shows us the value of mobility in a free society. The documentary opens with historian Gretchen Sorin’s framing of this organizing framework: Clocking in at almost two hours, its scope is breathtaking. So when Neal reached out recently asking me to review an upcoming PBS documentary, Driving While Black, it seemed apt for me to do so.ĭriving While Black is so much more than I expected. A few years ago, soon after the shooting death of Black motorist Philando Castile, my friend Neal Pollack reached out to talk about a phenomenon he’d just heard of-”Driving While Black.” Having been Black my entire life, I was too happy to share with my buddy the challenges and constant apprehension that many Black people experience when driving (and honestly, doing virtually anything in public).
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