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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …