Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor Christy Clark-Pujara (bio) Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. By Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 218. Cloth, $34.95.) Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor uses travel as a lens to examine black freedom in the North during the antebellum era, exploring in Colored Travelers the challenges and obstacles black Americans encountered as they journeyed inside and outside the United States. Pryor convincingly asserts that government-sanctioned segregation, social customs, and popular culture "surveilled, curtailed, and discouraged black mobility," and she contends that African Americans refused to be contained and instead fought for their right to move freely around their communities, the country, and the world (1). Her approach is as refreshing and creative as it is illuminating. Many historians have detailed the restrictions placed on black freedom in the free antebellum North, and other scholars have focused on the organizations established and led by the black elite to combat race-based discrimination. Pryor provides a major contribution by focusing on those who traveled, often to speak on the abolitionist circuit and to establish and support national and local organizations committed to racial justice and equity. Others traveled to preach or attend church, to conduct business, or to visit friends and family. Pryor reminds us that the act of traveling was itself race work because a distinct feature of freedom was and is mobility. Black travelers insisted on their rights as free people to wander the country and the world; the obstacles they faced illuminate how the practice of race-based slavery in the United States plagued all black people regardless of their status. Pryor uses the letters and journals of black travelers, government documents, and newspapers to evaluate black freedom in the American republic. She begins by highlighting the dangers and indignities of circumscribed black freedom in the North, following African Americans as they attempted to traverse cities, the countryside, and finally the ocean. She chronicles their experiences abroad, primarily in England, and explores how their travels affected how they thought about freedom. The first three chapters detail the complexities of northern racism and how black people resisted segregation on public transportation, where free blacks were likely to confront white hostility. She also critically examines the [End Page 648] history and use of the word "nigger," by both blacks and whites. Chapter 4 highlights how the state bolstered racial discrimination by denying black people passports. Chapter 5 investigates frustrations and indignities that black travelers faced on their way to Europe aboard American ships that enforced segregation. In the epilogue, Pryor concludes that black Americans' travel abroad expanded their ideas of what freedom should look and feel like. The northern cities described by Pryor pulsated with racism, where the racial epithet "nigger" was "an omnipresent refrain in the streets of the antebellum North" reverberating "with white belonging and black exile" as whites grappled with the loss of legal mastery over black bodies (10, 12). Public transportation—trains, stagecoaches, steamships—as an expression of black mobility and freedom that many whites resented, afforded sites for repression and control. Railroad workers in Massachusetts designated "Jim Crow" cars for black travelers, spaces they filled with luggage and pets and "almost all manner of dirty things—a buffalo skin filled with coal dust, and slippers, dirty rags" (81). Black travelers responded to these insults and indignities by refusing to sit in segregated seating; they sued; they petitioned their respective state governments and the federal government; they wrote letters to the editor; and they even engaged in physical confrontations. Pryor demonstrates that these black travelers pioneered a movement of African American protest of public transportation. An expanded explanation of why white northerners were so virulently racist would have strengthened this portion of the narrative. White Americans, rich and poor, benefited from race-based slavery even when it was not practiced in their local communities, because race-based slavery elevated the social, political, and economic standing of all white people. Pryor effectively highlights the transformative experiences of travel abroad. When black Americans traveled to Europe they noted...