Nigger and Home

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.

Introduction

“I am unable to travel in any part of this country without calling forth illustrations of the dark spirit of slavery at every step.”1 The words of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written in 1852, were literal. He meant not only that slavery infiltrated every aspect of American life but also that traveling was hard. From at least the 1810s and until the Civil War, free African Americans in the antebellum North confronted obstacles to their mobility, including racial segregation in public space. It was difficult for a person of color to walk across town without being harassed, but the vehicles of public transportation—stagecoaches, steamships, and railroads—emerged as one of the most notorious spaces for antiblack aggression. Even so, when Douglass voiced his complaint, segregation was not yet the law of the land. It was not until the 1860s that southern states passed segregation laws, and it was not until 1896 that the federal government institutionalized “separate but equal” legislation in the United States....

The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.

Epilogue

In late 1851, William and Ellen Craft arrived in England, and something visceral happened. They reflected, “It was not until we stepped upon the shore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear.”1 When he traveled from New York to England in 1850, black abolitionist William Powell noticed a change so “sudden and unexpected” that he could “hardly believe [his] senses.”...

Activist Respectability and the Birth of the “Jim Crow Car”

Chapter 3 identifies the moment when colored travelers launched a movement in earnest. The movement took off in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when segregation on the Massachusetts railroad turned brutal. In part, this was because steam-powered passenger railroads were new. It was also because the president of one of the foremost Boston railroad lines created a novel invention, a separate car to carry black people and the poor. Rail road workers in Massachusetts dubbed the space the “Jim Crow car.” It was a method of racial control that institutionalized segregation as no method of transportation had before. In keeping with the criminalization of black mobility, the railroad directors not only insisted that people of color ride in the dirty, cramped spaces, but officials also employed conductors who served as enforcers and routinely beat, kicked, and ousted colored travelers who attempted to ride in the first-class car. To activists, standing up and risking white violence in the name of equality became a mark of black masculinity. In a strategy that continues to buttress civil rights protest today, colored travelers held the state accountable by turning to the courts for redress.

Becoming Mobile in the Age of Segregation

Between the 1780s and the 1850s, two separate and interconnected historical developments led to segregation as a method of social control. The first was black emancipation in the North, the result of a prolonged and uneven process that lasted decades. In light of African American freedom, white northerners began to imagine black people as people, although nominally free, in need of regulation. As a result, whites scrutinized the travel of free people of color with a level of suspicion previously reserved for slaves. Thus, a process best thought of as the criminalization of black mobility emerged. This was highly deleterious to African Americans because it fostered antiblack vigilantism in public space. At the same time, advances in technology brought on a “transportation revolution.” As an elite cohort of newly freed African Americans sought equal access to public vehicles, transportation proprietors and white passengers in the North viciously guarded the thresholds of stagecoaches, steamships, and railroads. Colored travelers fought back against exclusion in a variety of ways that highlight the importance of travel in their conceptions of citizenship. The protest strategies of these earliest activists planted the seeds of the nineteenth-century equal rights movement.

Documenting Citizenship

Chapter 4 tells the story of how, between 1834 and the 1860s, the U.S. Department of State refused to grant free people of color official passports for international travel. During a period when passport policy was still nascent, by rejecting black applicants, the federal government illustrated how travel and citizenship were inextricably linked in the United States. At the same time that African Americans could not get passports, state laws and customs required some people of color to carry a series of identification papers best thought of as racialized surveillance documents, including slave passes, black sailors’ passports, and free papers. Demonstrating how fundamentally raced the idea of carrying papers was to white Americans, when white people traveled abroad, they consistently grumbled about having to show their papers. For colored travelers, however, the passport was an object of desire because it denoted U.S. citizenship. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, by pushing the federal government to address racial restrictions for acquiring the U.S. passport, colored travelers rendered the question of black citizenship a matter of national import almost a decade before the 1857 Dred Scott decision did the same.