This is the work Candacy A. Taylor (perhaps) meant to write in her book, Overground Railroad, but failed to do. It is a solidly researched and smoothly written accounting of the myriad of pains American Blacks have suffered in merely traveling across the country. Trains, buses, cars, planes, and all the associated entities connected with them: passenger terminals, gas stations, lodging, eating, etc. It joins my personal Pantheon of best histories on the Black experience in the United States. In this case, the focus is transportation. It joins Ari Berman's book, Give Us the Ballot, and Carol Anderson's book, One Person, No Vote, on voting rights, Richard Rothstein's book, The Color of Law, on housing, Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery By Another Name, and Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, on incarceration, Danielle L. McGuire's book, At the Dark End of the Street, on women, and Phillip Dray's book, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, on lynchings. There are many fine histories out there besides these, but any reader, especially one who is not Black, or who is too young to have experienced what others may have gone through before them, would be far ahead of the average American, by reading these books, in understanding the massive obstacles that one set of Americans have put in Black America's way over the decades. As a side note about this particular book, besides the overwhelming and damaging biases displayed in this book, one reaction I had while reading it was how often the discrimination never even managed to go beyond simply petty nonsense, a desperate clinging to some vestige of superiority, like something an immature school kid would do to another classmate in spite, but, in these lesser cases, it was government officials and business leaders being the spoiled children, acting out. In short, at best, they never even rise past being really pathetic. Read this book and the others quickly before your state or local government bans them all, and burns them on the street in front of your house. ( )

Rosa Parks on a bus is probably one of the images that most readily comes to mind when people think about the American Civil Rights Movement. Yet as Mia Bay neatly demonstrates in Traveling Black, the relationship between travel, racism, and the struggle for civil rights has a far deeper and more complex history in the United States. Bay traces the origins of travel segregation in antebellum stagecoaches and steamboats, continues on to early twentieth-century trains and buses, shows the more subtle forms of discrimination practiced in the jet age, and connects it all finally to the continuing problems faced for those "Driving While Black" in the present day. I finished it amazed at how many white Americans were willing to incur additional expense and bother—even put themselves in actual physical danger—rather than allow Black people to move through the world in relative comfort and on equitable terms. An important read. ( )