Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile
Peoples & Things
00:00
The Role of the Automobile in the Civil Rights Movement
I think we stereotype African Americans as all poor people living in ghetto conditions and that's just not the case. Martin Luther King himself makes this point in his memoirs of the bus boycott strive towards freedom. The rental car becomes really important in the black freedom struggle because it's allowing people to get around when they are using airplanes to fly into these southern cities. But there are other aspects, I think, of the automobile that I hadn't really thought about that I think are very important.
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