Granville Clarke, Florida migratory agricultural worker studying road map before leaving Elizabeth City with his crew. They are going to Bridgeville, Delaware to work in a cannery.
Courtesy of North CarolinaDelano, Jack, photographer 1940 July
Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America
Discover how the advent of the automobile brought new mobility and freedom for African Americans but also exposed them to discrimination and deadly violence, and how that history resonates today.
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Fred Vigeant
Courtesy of North CarolinaDelano, Jack, photographer 1940 July
Granville Clarke, Florida migratory agricultural worker studying road map before leaving Elizabeth City with his crew. They are going to Bridgeville, Delaware to work in a cannery.
Watch this encore of Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America Friday, February 19 at 9:00pm on WITF. You can stream WITF TV live on our website and through the PBS Video app on Roku, Apple TV and iPhone and Android smartphones. The program is also available on-demand through the PBS Video app.
Join WITF for an encore presentation chronicling the riveting history and personal experiences – at once liberating and challenging, harrowing and inspiring, deeply revealing and profoundly transforming – of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond – Driving While Black explores the deep background of a recent phrase rooted in realities that have been an indelible part of the African American experience for hundreds of years – told in large part through the stories of the men, women and children who lived through it.
Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship – and based on and inspired in large part by Gretchen Sorin’s recently published study of the way the automobile and highways transformed African American life across the 20th century (Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (W.W. Norton, 2020) – the film examines the history of African Americans on the road from the depths of the Depression to the height of the Civil Rights movement and beyond, exploring along the way the deeply embedded dynamics of race, space and mobility in America during one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in American history.
Watch Driving While Black on WITF Tuesday February 19 at 9:00pm. This documentary originally aired on WITF on October 13. You can stream the program at its scheduled time through WITF’s live webstream on our website and through the PBS Video app on most smart phone and smart TV platforms. The program is also available on-demand through the PBS Video app.
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