About Mia Bay
Professor Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to arriving at Penn, Bay worked at Rutgers University, where she was a Professor of History and the Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Professor Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history, whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Toronto.
Bay’s publications include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader; as well as many articles and book chapters.
She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents, and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women, which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line, which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
Why have white supremacists and civil rights activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of “separate but equal” involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin?
Why were so many of those who challenged it in court women? How did it move from one form of transport to another, and what was it like to be caught up in this web of contradictory rules?
From stagecoaches, steamships, and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. “There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the ‘Jim Crow’ car of the southern United States,” W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, and ignored.
Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations and insisting on justice in the courts. Traveling Black upends our understanding of Black resistance, documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the Civil Rights Movement. A masterpiece of scholarly and human insight, this book helps explain why the long, unfinished journey to racial equality so often takes place on the road.
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