White people who benefit from what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the wages of whiteness” usually take the ordinary process of going from here to there for granted. But as Stanford professor Allyson Hobbs points out, this everyday right was historically “not available to all Americans.” Today, as Pasadena City College professor Christopher West observes, “driving in a racist society” persists as a “gut-wrenching horror.”
These Black academics are among the interviewees in PBS’s “Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America,” which focuses on how US “car culture” has, and continues to be, exclusionary.
The nearly two-hour documentary is a deep dive into the fraught history of Black people and transportation, from the Middle Passage, to passes permitting enslaved individuals to travel outside their plantations, to Jacob Blake getting shot in the back by police as he tried to re-enter his own SUV with his three young children inside.
“Driving While Black” is a captivating creative collaboration between a historian and a documentarian. Gretchen Sorin is a distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York Oneonta and author of “Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights,” on which the similarly named documentary is based. The Black scholar’s co-director is the white filmmaker Ric Burns, whom Sorin met while providing commentary for his 1999 “New York: A Documentary Film.”
Ric, the younger brother of filmmaker Ken Burns, co-produced the 1990’s landmark PBS nonfiction mini-series The Civil War. In 2012, when I interviewed Ken Burns about his film The Central Park Five he said: “In many ways it’s the same film, because almost every film we’ve done has touched on or come up against the question of race in America.”
Ric Burns has a similar passion for documenting the central role race continues to play in America, and much of “Driving While Black” is revealed via original onscreen interviews with a predominantly Black team of historians, authors, and educators, including Sorin herself.
Their insightful commentary is skillfully intercut with gripping imagery. Diagrams of slave ships, prints and handbills advertising slave auctions and reporting runaway slaves, instruments of torture, photographs of lynchings, extensive archival and television footage, news clips, and commercials — plus animation — establish the impact of the automobile on Black Americans.
In order to do so, one must go “back to day one … to the root of it,” insists Birmingham-born Herb Boyd, who teaches Black studies at the City College of New York. In a vintage recording, a formerly enslaved man relates how passes were required for getting around, and that prior to emancipation, many field hands were confined to one square mile, never traveling beyond their plantation’s boundaries.
As the traditional spiritual song “You Gotta Move” plays, given the current tension between minorities and law enforcement, Sorin poignantly notes “policing starts with slave catchers … there to terrorize and intimidate” those who’d fled bondage, often via the Underground Railroad. Sorin adds that the 1850s Fugitive Slave Act allowed these human hounds to recapture escapees up North, and thus “lit the fuse that started the Civil War.”
“Driving While Black” proceeds to explore one of America’s most promising periods, Reconstruction, and then one of its worst: the Jim Crow era, when decades of segregation, degradation, and sharecropping ruled the apartheid-like South.
Fath Davis Ruffins, curator of African American History and Culture in the Division of Home and Community Life in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, says: “The story of Jim Crow is of daily violence — the threat you may be a victim at any moment because of how you look.”
The trepidation of train travel is also exposed, with Blacks often confined to the smoke-filled car behind the engine—even if one had purchased a first class seat, as was codified by the Supreme Court’s racist Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896.
But that same year, the automobile was invented, and the auto industry’s mass production offered Black Americans higher paying jobs, spurring the Great Migration, the largest migration in the history of the US. From 1916 to 1970, six million Black Southerners fled northward and westward in search of better wages and more freedom.
Boyd calls Detroit, the car industry’s hub, “a sort of Shangri La” where Henry Ford offered $5 for a day’s work, enabling Southern Blacks to “dispense with the hoe, the plow, and to shoot the mule.”
In addition to offering employment, what Ruffins describes as “a real pathway to the middle class,” that same industry also manufactured the very means for greater mobility: the car. “Driving is a way to get out of train travel,” which, under segregation, was full of indignities, comments Hobbs.
“What the auto allows is personal freedom,” Ruffins adds, “but you’re still African American in a white supremacist society.”
As the postwar boom develops, cars present challenges for Black Americans, who must literally navigate a country that still practices racial separation. A series of travel guidebooks, most notably “The Green Book,” which Sorin dubs “the Bible for every Negro traveler,” advise roadtrippers as to where it’s safe for Black people to get gas, dine, stay the night, or simply relieve themselves in segregated states.
Light is shed on the stereotypical role vehicles play as status symbols for disenfranchised people “in a society where Blacks can’t own other forms of property, such as real estate,” Ruffins insightfully points out, adding that the car represented “democratic personhood, a symbol of personal freedom, in movies, pop culture.” Black Americans, too, wanted to “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” as Dinah Shore is shown singing in the popular 1950s television ad.
Although “Driving While Black” doesn’t consider the environmental costs of the internal combustion engine, the petroleum industry, and the associated contributions to global warming, its grand finale does zoom in on the collision between Black motorists and the police.
Rodney King and activist Sandra Bland—both of whom were pulled over for, respectively, speeding and a minor traffic violation, with dire consequences—are touched upon. A hair-raising montage of similar incidents between Black drivers and police officers around the country is extremely troubling and culminates with the uncensored fusillade of bullets fired into Jacob Blake’s back as his children look on in horror from the backseat of the SUV he was attempting to enter.
Proclaiming “I don’t want your pity. I want change,” Blake’s eloquently defiant sister, Letetra Widman, gets the last word, along with James Baldwin, one of the late Black luminaries quoted in this compelling, do-not-miss film that’s on the road from the 17th century to today, placing racism then and now in its headlights.
The documentary Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America premieres on PBS October 13.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020
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