Driving While Black Quotes

“Villa Grove, Illinois, mounted a siren on the town’s water tower that sounded each day at 6 p.m. The custom, which continued until 1998, warned African Americans within the town’s borders that it was time to leave.38”
― Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

“Looking back often provides a way to move forward.”
― Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

“A black man from St. Louis, noting the city's poor housing conditions for some black residents, observed, "a flashy car becomes their living room." An African American businessman told Time Magazine: "Negroes are driven to spend their earnings in showy ways because they still cannot get the more ordinary things a white man with a similar income would buy." An article in Ebony pointed out that many black people lacked access to housing, leisure pursuits, and the other good things that a white American might buy with discretionary income: "Long ago they found out that they could not live in the best neighborhoods, eat in the best restaurants, go to the best resorts because of racial discrimination.”
― Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights