![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Through his relationship with Sorin, Burns also learned that to drive and vacation while Black involved strategic plans and actions that white vacationers - because of what W.E.B Du Bois described as “the wages of whiteness” - never had to consider. You know, all the things so familiar from a mid-century experience of automobile travel.” So, I know what it is to get in the car and go down to Rehoboth for a week at the beach and stop at the Howard Johnson. “Five years ago, Gretchen sat me down and showed me thousands of photographs of an America that, in some sense, I kind of only knew the white side of,” Burns says. In addition to working as the curator of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Ruffins is a mom, who shares her fears for her children who drive while Black.Įxploring every angle of Black mobility meant a great deal to Burns, who first met Sorin when they worked together on his 1999 epic undertaking, New York: A Documentary Film. The list includes Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University history professor Allyson Hobbs, and Fath Ruffins. Sorin is interviewed in the film along with leading historians, authors and journalists, many of whom she’s known for 30 years. But they didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of segregated trains and buses if they owned cars.ĭriving While Black also explores other facets of Black mobility, including Victor Hugo Green and Alma Green’s travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book, as well as the way in which interstate highways plowed through and destroyed bustling Black American enclaves. Upon arriving, Black people learned Jim Crow practices existed all over America, not just in the South. Many of the enslaved stayed because they had no place else to go.”Īfter slavery came Reconstruction and, later, the Great Migration from 1916-1970, which saw millions of Black Southerners move to upwardly mobile Northern and Western cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. “Look at Winslow Homer’s painting A Visit from the Old Mistress. “Enslaved Black people didn’t stay on plantations because they loved the white people who enslaved them,” Sorin says. Library of Congress interviews with former enslaved Americans Fountain Hughes and Billy McCrae in the 1940s also help to drive home the point that the over-policing of Black bodies originated before and during the peculiar institution of slavery. But telling their story gave me a deeper understanding of them.”īlack mobility and the freedom and limitations that accompany it is a major theme in the film, which traces this country’s restrictive treatment of Black folks back to slavery and the violence and forced journey through the Middle Passage. “My brother and I thought their behaviors were peculiar when we went on vacation. “It made me understand my parents and gave me a deep appreciation for these people who grew up in the Jim Crow era,” Sorin tells Shondaland. The film is now airing on PBS and streaming on the PBS app. It also inspired the new PBS documentary, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, which Sorin directed with filmmaker Ric Burns. Sorin, who is also an exhibit curator and distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York, spent 25 years researching the book, which hit store shelves earlier this year. ![]()
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