Event
Traveling Black: Exploring a History of Race and Resistance
The first comprehensive account of the African American experience on segregated transportation from the antebellum era to the present day, the book Traveling Black is a chronicle of a people in motion over a more than century of transformative social and technological change, It highlights both the inequities of traveling black and African American struggles for freedom of movement, documenting a sustained fight for mobility that falls largely outside the organizational history of the Civil Rights movement. Bay’s talk will offer an overview of the book and discuss the research and writing challenges it posed.
Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history, whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Her publications include Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021),The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins, 2012) and the co-editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Bay is the 2021 Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at Washington College’s Starr Center, where she is completing a new book about African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.
This program includes a book signing. Books will be available for purchase following the talk and signing by the author.