"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
|Miriam Thaggert is an associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance.
