Good Roads and Anti-Black Violence

Abstract

Following Progressive-era advocacy (1890–1930), a modernized road work site emerged in the U.S. South designed to be populated by mobile fleets of Black imprisoned laborers. The forced road work dislodged U.S. roads from their localized production and maintenance so they could assume an expert-led, technological form—physically and discursively. On the road, however, labor was merely a means of violently reifying hierarchical racial differences, making the “good road” a monument to the modern persistence of state-enacted anti-Blackness. This article assesses the emergence of this regional, racial system of anti-Black violence alongside the undertheorized spatial situation of the imprisoned laborers themselves by consulting the report of Bayard Rustin following time spent on a Roxboro, North Carolina, prison road work camp. The report recounts his own experiences along with those of other men, as well as their songs. The laborers’ firsthand accounts foreground persistent desires for loves, families, and homes beyond the racial capitalist traumas undergirding U.S. transportation geographies.