On Monday, June 2, 2025, historian Mia Bay, in conversation with Teaching for Black Lives co-editor Jesse Hagopian, will discuss Bay’s book, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, which explores racial restrictions on transportation and resistance to the injustice.
One of the supposed hallmarks of a free democratic society is the ability to travel without restriction. That has not been the case for Black Americans. From slavery through Jim Crow and beyond they faced a plethora of rules, formal and informal, that made travel a daunting enterprise. Mia Bay is one of the outstanding historians of her generation, and she asks crucial questions: Why were so many of the early challenges to segregated travel brought by women? Why was travel by train and bus such a problem for the racial hierarchy, particularly in the South, and why did it become such a focal point of resistance? Timely and well written, Traveling Black offers a powerful new vision of the long arc of protest against racial segregation in America. — Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello
Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University Pennsylvania. Professor Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose recent interests include Black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation.
Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits — “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968” — and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.
These online classes with people’s historians are held at least once a month (generally on Mondays) at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET for 90 minutes. In each session, the historian is interviewed by a teacher and breakout rooms allow participants to meet each other in small groups, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. We designed the sessions for teachers and other school staff. Parents, students, and others are also welcome to participate.
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