Jim Crow Terminals The Desegregation of American Airports / Anke Ortlepp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ortlepp, Anke, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Segregation.

African Americans.

Airports--Law and legislation--United States.

Airports.

Discrimination in public accommodations--Southern States.

Discrimination in public accommodations.

Segregation in transportation--Southern States.

Segregation in transportation.

Air travel--United States--History--20th century.

Air travel.

Airports--United States--History--20th century.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (220 pages) : illustrations

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2017

Place of Publication:

Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2017]

Summary:

Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century's transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping aviation's legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the struggles of black travelers-to enjoy the same freedoms on the airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin-in the context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted entanglements of "race" and "space."

Contents:

The emergence of the Jim Crow airport

On location : direct action against airport segregation

In the courts : private litigation as a road to desegregation

Changing the law of the land : regulatory and statutory reform

Back in the courts : federal antisegregation lawsuits.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780820350943

082035094X

OCLC:

1000521644