New Books In African American Studies

Gretchen Sorin’s book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020) is Sorin’s ode to a part of history that has not been told to its fullest. Its pages include 75 powerful images that together, demonstrate that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented them by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Sorin recovers a lost history and shows how, when combined with black travel guides, including the famous Green Book, the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression. Gretchen Sorin is the director and a distinguished professor of the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies—one of the oldest museum studies programs in the United States and still “at the forefront of the