“The ‘bad’ Black driver: Respectability,criminality and cars in Washington,D.C.,1910s–1930s”

Abstract

This article examines newspapers, interviews, sociological reports, literature, government documents, and the personal papers of Black elites to show how automobility provided status and citizenship for many African Americans in Washington, D.C., between the 1910s and 1930s. It also argues that the image of the suspicious Black driver that circulated in D.C. in the early decades of the last century helped to criminalise African American motorists in the US capital during the rise of Jim Crow.