Industrial Revolutions: African American Commuters and the Climate of Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Rail-Cars

While the railway network's expansion during the nineteenth century profoundly impacted the ecological environment of the United States – a change famously documented in Henry Thoreau’s Walden – it also created a new... [ view full abstract ]

While the railway network's expansion during the nineteenth century profoundly impacted the ecological environment of the United States – a change famously documented in Henry Thoreau’s Walden – it also created a new kind of spatial environment: the passenger car. My paper examines the social climate encountered by black travelers during the period of de facto segregation, when ticket-holders were assigned to and removed from seats on an ad hoc basis, creating racial, gender, and class hierarchies that varied from journey to journey, conductor to conductor. I focus on two commuters, Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells, who traveled for work early in careers as activists for racial equity as the nation transitioned from slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

In his 1855 autobiography Douglass recounts a train journey on which he is torn from his seat (and tears the seat from its bolts) when he refuses to move to the “‘Jim Crow car.’” This was one of many “battles” undertaken on abolitionist lecture-circuits through so-called free states. Thirty years later, Wells, commuting to teach at a school outside of Memphis, insisted on maintaining her seat in the “Ladies Car” and was likewise violently ejected. She sued the rail company but lost her case before the Tennessee Supreme Court, a decade before Plessy v. Ferguson. The ongoing chaos within a space built to ensure order, predictability, and physical safety serves to illuminate the everyday threats and actual violence faced by black Americans going about their business as citizens under a Constitution likewise built for predictability and protection.