Introduction

Abstract

The introduction details the significance of mobility for the African American subject and the dilemmas travel, and especially train travel, posed to African American women. Tracing earlier cultural studies of the train – Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey – the chapter notes how those studies lack a discussion of Black women and Black laborers. Riding Jane Crow examines four specific forms or instances of Black female railroad travel—early Black female intellectuals who described Black female travel as passengers, Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first-class “ladies’ cars,” Black women railroad station food vendors, and Black maids on Pullman trains—to see one of the most important forms of public transportation through the eyes of African American women. Using the experience of fugitive Ellen Craft as an example, the introduction defines terms such as performative train riding, situational riding, and precarity of proximity. The introduction ends with a brief discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois, progress, and Black femininity in The Souls of Black Folk.