"Using literary analysis and comprehensive archival research, Thaggert resituates Pauli Murray's legal theorization of 'Jane Crow' into the context of Black female railroad travel, considering how Black women's experiences as passengers and workers trouble depictions of the train as a technological symbol of American progress." —Hypatia
"Over the long twentieth century, black women navigated the gendered, sexualized, racialized hierarchies of American railroads, producing something new in American cultural history, a counter-story of Black female railroad history. With meticulous and creative archival research, Thaggert tells the story of Black female fugitive slaves, Black Pullman maids, Black female food vendors, and elite Black women travelers, who challenged the violence and humiliations of race and gendered train spaces and even, in some instances, secured their constitutional right to freedom and mobility."—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
"In this well-researched and accessible volume, Miriam Thaggert explores the little-known histories of railroads and Black women, as passengers, food vendors and maids." —Ms. Magazine
"This extremely well written scholarly work addresses the fact that much of the history of Black Americans has been tied to their inability to freely move about the nation." —Library Journal, starred review
"Riding Jane Crow is a must-read for anyone interested in the life of the train in American history, and especially the racial underpinnings that are less frequently the topic of its story. But the book also represents the undertaking of an astonishing scholar, furnishing hundreds of primary sources by which the reader can and should continue to educate themselves on the topic. While Thaggert expertly toes the line between her voice and those that...
