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Ronald J. Stephens, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 222–223, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.222
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Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War fills a void in the literature on slavery, citizenship, and Jim Crow-segregation practices in the United States before the Civil War, demonstrating how “free people of color negotiated white hostility in public space” while traveling (2). The enforcement of these early segregated traveling policies to restrict pioneering colored travelers inspired them, in their quest for citizenship, to construct ideas about freedom and respectability and to devise “strategies to resist segregation” (2). The structural decision to restrict the traveling experiences of these middle-class, educated colored activists and travelers who relied on steamships, stagecoaches, and railroads to travel inspired them to fight against slavery and racism, as well as to wage long legal battles for citizenship rights. In examining prevailing racist ideologies that made black mobility a crime, Pryor illustrates how “people such as [Frederick] Douglass, Paul Cuffe, Robert Purvis, Susan Paul, Samuel Cornish, David Ruggles, Charles Remond, William Wells Brown, Elizabeth Jennings, and J. W. C. Pennington were among the first activists to make equal access to public conveyances a central feature of black protest” (3). Additionally, “the most elite of these [travelers and] activists became transatlantic abolitionists and crossed the ocean to visit cities such as Liverpool, London, Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, and Berlin” (2). However, Pryor’s focus on the U.S. domestic scene in the nineteenth century—a period when African American educators, ministers, and social justice activists and leaders were victims of these Jim Crow traveling restrictions and practices, primarily enforced by conductors, and of the verbal racist assaults espoused by white workers and young and adult passengers—illustrates the reason for African American protest and resistance.
