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J. Mills Thornton, Blair L. M. Kelley. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 256. $59.95., The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 2, April 2011, Page 468, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.2.468
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This excellent book is the first monographic treatment of the wave of streetcar boycotts that swept across the South at the beginning of the twentieth century to protest the advent of racial segregation on municipal trolley lines. After an introductory description of the legal actions brought by blacks against the segregation of streetcars in New York City just before the Civil War, the volume turns its attention to boycotts in New Orleans (1902), Richmond (1904), and Savannah (1906). In each case Blair L. M. Kelley provides us with subtle and carefully researched accounts of the background and course of the protests.
Historians of the long civil rights movement, following the early investigations of August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, have tended to dismiss the leaders of these boycotts as racially moderate accommodationists, and therefore to date the genuine beginnings of the movement to the black and white radicalism of the 1920s. Kelley's portrait is far more sympathetic. Some boycott leaders did indeed blame the coming of segregation on poorer whites, and looked to the white upper class for assistance in repealing the new laws. But all were militant opponents of racial discrimination who sought black solidarity in opposition to the rising tide of white supremacy. And, at least initially, they received widespread support from the black working class in their cities, even though the boycotts required particularly heavy sacrifices from black laborers and domestics who lacked other forms of transportation. The principal factor that separated the protests of the early twentieth century from those at mid‐century was simply the inability of the boycotters to gain a sympathetic hearing in the courts. This description of early black resistance to segregation, if taken to heart by students of the subject, will necessitate a substantial reconsideration of recent accounts of the origins of civil rights militancy.
