Writing Assignment #3 Dorian Munford

In Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War,

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor explains how during the Antebellum Era, African Americans fought

obstructions such as verbal racialized threats and any possible attempt by the white man to

criminalize black mobility. However, throughout all of this, African Americans still found a way

to travel and used this strategy of protest to essentially begin the battle for equal rights for

African Americans before the Civil War began, a century before the Montgomery Bus Boycott

led by Rosa Parks.

Activists such as Frederick Douglas keyed the term “colored travelers” to describe people

of color who risked their lives everyday to travel and “nourish the American and transatlantic

abolitionist movements.” They did travel within the city that they resided in but they also moved

through major cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and minor cities like Augusta,

Albany and Cincinnati. They encountered trials and tribulations each time they stepped foot

outside of their house, which is why people of color established two main ideals of black protest.

The first ideal was that core features of American citizenship included, “access to transportation,

the processes of travel, and indeed mobility itself.” The second ideal was simply that African

Americans have the right to move freely and independently, and if this right was denied to them,

they had every reason to fight for it.

Pryor dedicates a whole chapter to the etymology of the word nigger. Whites used this

word to terrorize colored travelers but then began to use the word to “mock black speech, black

mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom.” Hosea Easton, a black minister, documented how

white parents would discipline their children by telling them stories of “nigger bogeymen” and

how they’ll be worthless just like black people. This shows how white adults instilled in their

children that blacks will never be worth anything. They instilled the idea of racism in their
 Writing Assignment #3 Dorian Munford

children at a young age, but made them believe that this was just the way the world is supposed

to be. Racism is a learned behavior and is generational. Once white people realized black people

were also using the word nigger unapologetically and against their own people, they began to use

it to mock black speech.

Criminalizing black mobility “by making it appear illegal, suspicious, unconscionable,

inappropriate, and anathema to American identity” is what White Americans did to prevent

African Americans from gaining equal access to public transportation. This was significant

according to Pryor because white and black Americans both knew how imperative travel was for

citizenship. Black activists began to fight for their equal access to public vehicles. In the late

1830s and early 1840s, segregation on public transportation became more and more popular.

Starting on the Massachusetts railroads, they named the cargo car black people rode in the “Jim

Crow Car.” Essentially. This was a method of racial control and the colored travelers simply

would not put up with the segregation, so they took it to the antebellum U.S. courts to solve the

problem.

Some of the most famous colored travelers during the antebellum era such as, William

and Ellen Craft, William Powell, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown were the reason

why African Americans could travel freely in and through public spaces. Of course, even after

being granted the right to travel, they still faced discrimination but they couldn’t be denied the

right to travel on any mode of public transportation they chose. African American stood up for

their rights for citizenship and always refused to conform to white supremacy. Elizabeth Pryor

describes this movement in the Antebellum Era as the birth of a movement of African Americans

fighting for equal rights and freedom that has continued even into today’s time.
 Writing Assignment #3 Dorian Munford

References

1. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship

before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.