IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

Before the Civil Rights Act, routes depicted on typical interstate highway maps took on another meaning for African-American travelers. Unlike the Green Book, an essential travel glossary for Black travelers in the 1930s-’60s USA, maps systematically ignored one crucial layer: where Black people could safely and legally drive, sleep, or fill up gas. The network of roads designed to represent an infrastructure of “American freedom” became effective dead ends for Black travelers. In this paper (and accompanying collages over original 1958 ESSO road maps), I will argue that the invisibility of racialized transportation routes on government and commercial travel maps allowed American policymakers, urbanists, and transportation engineers to escape culpability for their participation in financing an inherently racist infrastructure project. Victor H. Green’s Negro Motorist Green Book (1936-1966) is an essential primary source to validate this. However, the ‘Green Book was only optionally accompanied by maps (often provided by ‘benevolent’ corporate partners, like the Esso gas company) that failed to visualize the safe travel routes versus racialized infrastructure gaps that the annual publication’s business listings exposed. Representational cartography is one of the most powerful tools for fomenting a common understanding of cultural and economic histories. Unlike the visual archive of housing discrimination provided by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “red-lining” maps, historians and geographers lack similar cartographic proof that the transportation infrastructure connecting segregated neighborhoods equally circumscribed African Americans’ mobility. This paper will illustrate how a lack of representational maps allowed the United States to cement these stratified networks into its landscapes for nearly a century thus far.