Driving While Black 2x54, 1x118

This feature length documentary film will chronicle the history of African Americans on the road from the 1930s to the late 1960s – a crucial and transformative period in American racial, cultural and social history. As black Americans navigated the brave new world of the automobile and the highway in the last four decades of Jim Crow America – from the depths of the Depression to the heyday of the Civil Rights movement and beyond – they seized opportunities for mobility and freedom in the American landscape as never before, and confronted challenges and dangers unknown to white drivers and passengers. Meanwhile, across the country, the automobile and the highway were dramatically changing the external and internal geography of America – socially, economically, politically, culturally, and technologically – beyond recognition.