Colored Travelers

Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

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Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet ofcitizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historicallybeen a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryorshows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomerybus. These were “colored travelers,” activists who relied on steamships,stagecoaches, and railroads to expand their networks and to fight slaveryand racism. They refused to ride in “Jim Crow” railroad cars, fought for theright to hold a U.S. passport (and citizenship), and during their transatlanticvoyages, demonstrated their radical abolitionism. By focusing on the myriadstrategies of black protest, including the assertions of gendered freedom andcitizenship, this book tells the story of how the basic act of traveling emergedas a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the CivilWar.

Drawing on exhaustive research from U.S. and British newspapers, journals,narratives, and letters, as well as firsthand accounts of such figures asFrederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown, Pryor illustrateshow, in the quest for citizenship, colored travelers constructed ideasabout respectability and challenged racist ideologies that made black mobilitya crime.