Restrictions

RESTRICTIONS

It is hard to overstate the limitations imposed upon—and the solutions found by—African Americans and people of African descent across the twentieth century. 

Surveilled and stigmatized, exiled abroad or prevented from moving, Black travelers faced very real dangers. These dangers are reflected throughout the twentieth century and worldwide, from Jim Crow laws to apartheid, from passports withheld or withdrawn to refugee status denied.

Entertainers or sports stars, performing for both Black and white audiences by day, navigated the roads carefully at night—and at their peril. People of African descent traveled nevertheless, whether through joining the military and becoming Tuskegee Airmen, taking weekend aviation classes, or simply by planning a Sunday drive. Black travel guides like the Green Books offered what former Schomburg Center scholar-in-residence Candacy Taylor terms the “Overground Railroad”—a system of private homes, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues that offered safe havens throughout the United States, and even abroad. A new car, a train ride, a first-time plane ticket: all were forms of pleasure that Black people embraced to combat the drudgery and degradations of daily life. 

There were other more active forms of resistance to restrictions imposed by law and by threat—including by the U.S. government, which would confiscate performer and radical Paul Robeson’s passport, not allowing him to travel and support himself, while revoking activist Claudia Jones’s immigration status, forcing her to return to England. She was not alone—Black leader Marcus Garvey, whose Black Star Line had promised travel back to an African homeland, was targeted and deported to Jamaica by the US Government in 1929, while in the postwar era the FBI tracked nearly every movement of Civil Rights leaders from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X to hundreds of others fighting for freedom. 

Such policings crest in the 1970s correspondence of Steven Biko, the South African freedom fighter who was banned by the white-led apartheid government from traveling outside his township or meeting with more than one person. As the letters attest, Biko’s requests for everything from attending funerals to playing rugby were inevitably denied. Eventually arrested in 1977 at a roadblock just weeks after the last letter here, he was found dead on September 12 after police beat him while in their custody. 

His letters, newly acquired and never before exhibited, testify to the freedom sought in print and in life by sustained resistors to a widespread system of white supremacy designed to restrict Black mobility in all senses.