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Civil Rights

James Madison University

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Drive Toward Freedom: African American: The Story Of Black Automobility In The Fight For Civil Rights, Xavier Macy Dec 2015

Drive Toward Freedom: African American: The Story Of Black Automobility In The Fight For Civil Rights, Xavier Macy

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Looking across the 20th century, this thesis seeks to understand the relationship African Americans developed between automobility and the fight for civil rights, filling a gap left in the historiography of both the automobile and the Civil Rights Movement. Historians of the automobile have almost exclusively focused their lens on white suburbia and the “autotopias” that Americans created, while historians of the Civil Rights Movement ignored the automobile entirely. This thesis hopes to begin to fill that void by explaining how African Americans exploited the technological system of the automobile to create forms of transportation accessible to African American …