Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

Bloomberg Best Nonfiction Books of 2020: '[A] tour de force.'The basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns, this excellent history (The New Yorker) reveals how the automobile fundamentally changed African American life.Driving While Black demonstrates that the carthe ultimate symbol of independence and possibilityhas always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her familys story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guidesincluding the famous Green Bookthe automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.