by Sarah A. Seo

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
by Gretchen Sorin
Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
by Candacy Taylor
Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00
The New York Review of Books

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America. [Read more…]