REPLAY: Riding Jane Crow

From working in the food car to sitting in first class, Black women are critical to the history of the American railroad. Miriam Thaggert’s book is Riding Jane Crow African American Women on the American Railroad.

While many European writers in the 1800’s described the open road as a place of freedom, African-Americans experienced a different reality. Michael Hall is the author of Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters.

Phyllis Wheatley YWCAs served African-American girls and women during the early 1900s as almost all public spaces were unsafe for them. Michelle Ellis Young is working to tell the history, and restore the original building that housed the first Black YWCA in Virginia’s South Hampton Roads region.

Richard Straw is collecting oral histories of people who hit the road and did a lot of hitchhiking during the youthful unrest of the 1960’s.