Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson

by Blair L.M. Kelley

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation.

Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores the community organizations that bound protestors together and the divisions of class, gender, and ambition that sometimes drove them apart. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Race, Politics

280 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2010

About the author

Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian, Kelley works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history.

Kelley is the author of two books. The first, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (UNC Press), awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, chronicles the little-known Black men and women who protested the passage of laws segregating trains and streetcars at the turn of the twentieth century. Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), draws on family histories and mines the archive to illuminate the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America in the past and present. Black Folk was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation, and the 2022-23 John Hope Franklin/NEH Fellowship by National Humanities Center.

Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University.

Reviews

[Katie Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work. It illuminates a period of African-American protest that often gets glossed over in the historical record--the streetcar boycotts in Southern cities in the early 1900s. Too often, we fall into the trap of believing that mass protest against Jim Crow segregation only began in the 1950s; and as this book shows, that's simply not true.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosa Parks wasn't the first. Black protests over segregation on transportation go back to before the Civil War and continued through Reconstruction and the early 20th century.
Kelley is partly responding to earlier scholarship that found these fights were entirely a matter for the black elite; working class blacks either didn't care (not many could afford train tickets) or didn't see the point in a hopeless fight. As she shows, however, most of the working class relied on street cars or trolleys to get to their jobs or run errands for their employers so they were affected too. And opposed it as a very public humiliation. Women, in particular, found being unable to access the women's cars that gave white women privacy exposed them to the rougher, sexually aggressive men in the smoking cars (this book overlaps with some of the material in "Dark End of the Street").
4.5 because Kelley's writing is very dry. Still worth reading.

[Connor Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars - This text does incredibly important work in correcting the narrative of turn-of-20th-century Black life as accommodationist by highlighting the radical tradition of boycott originating directly in the aftermath of emancipation and Reconstruction, effectively tethering the mass movements of the mid-20th century to the legacies and traditions of enslaved and freedpeople's demands for personhood. That being said, the detail of the text and the different casts of characters in each location made it somewhat difficult to keep track of and could have been more immersive.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profiles anti-segregation boycotts in NOLA (1902), Savannah (1904), and Richmond (1906). Gives a lot of context from times before that, too. Every medium to large city in the former confederacy saw protests and boycotts against transport segregation laws. A lot of them, before Plessy v. Fergusson (1896), were victories. For an academic book the writing is really not bad at all.

[TJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good. But very academic. Heady

[Nat Zorach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great history that compares the economic and urban geographic contexts of streetcar boycotts and racial discrimination. Extremely well written and deeply researched, but not overly academic.

[Iejones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is a great look at what the issues race had on mobility for Black people in three southern cities. The image of Rosa Parks did not begin in the 1950s nor the 20th century - African American women were fighting for equal protection under the law and the ability to move freely throughout southern cities. The restrictions on mobility dampened their sense of citizenship and attempted to circumscribe their "living worlds." Black women took proactive aims at discrimination from passive to legal recourse which laid the foundation/groundwork for future protest. Moreover, Kelley's portrayal of Booker Washington recasts this leader as a power broker whose desire to "maintain" control crushed any number of people and voices - female and male alike.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tells a little-known (at least to me) story of African American streetcar boycotts in the Jim Crow South (with a great intro about the antebellum streetcar protests in NYC.) Kelley does a good job navigating the story of boycotts which from this vantage point look like failures, stressing the violence and disfranchisement African Americans were suffering, the community's resilience in the face of this, and the complexities of division within the African American community. It is a hard history to read because of the brutality and callousness of whites in the North and South. Yet there is also a lot to admire in the African American community and Kelley clearly sees this period as a legacy for the civil rights movement.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kelley can be repetitive at times with her writing, but overall this an incredibly detailed book and showcases strong research skills and passion. Certainly one to be considered when looking at the daily lives of African-Americans in the Jim Crow era.