'A right to ride': African American citizenship, identity, and the protest over Jim Crow transportation (Louisiana, Virginia, Georgia)

This project is a comparative study of African American protest against de jure segregation of trains and streetcars in three southern cities, New Orleans, Louisiana, Richmond, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia from 1891–1907. In the years prior to the turn of the twentieth century, African American southerners confronted the question of how best to challenge the limits of disfranchisement, white violence, and the rising tide of legal segregation in order to solidify black American citizenship. Their responses were modified by differences of status and background that tempered their lives. This project utilizes protest as a vehicle for examining how African Americans reconstituted the meanings of their identity at the dawn of the 20th century.; Using archival collections of black leaders, African American and white urban newspapers, city directories, census records, state segregation laws, city ordinances, corporate utility records, federal case law, historic maps, and photographs, this project highlights the individuals, organizations, and communities that rejected attempts to separate them from whites on trains and streetcars. This project retraces two protests movements; the collective organizing in New Orleans that led to the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, and the 1900–1907 southern streetcar boycott movement led by locally organized blacks in more than twenty-five cities. This project connects this history to recent studies of African American life in the Jim Crow South, to explore the interchange between black civil society and the contestation of segregation law.; By recreating the narratives of protest, this dissertation uncovers the ways that social status, gender, culture, and color interconnected to create social meaning within segregated black communities, and the political ramifications of these differences among African Americans during protests against racial segregation. This project calls for a reconsideration of the turn of the century as the age of accommodation. This history indicates that black communities only tolerated segregation after years of trying to stem the tide of Jim Crow law.