Segregation on the Railway
“On arriving at Sandusky, he learned that colored people were not allowed to take seats in the cars with whites, and that, as there was no Jim Crow car on that road, blacks were generally made to ride in the baggage-car. Mr. Brown, however, went into one of the best passenger cars, seated himself, crossed his legs, and looked as unconcerned as if the car had been made for his sole use” (56-7).
—Josephine Brown, Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter, 1856
By 1844, William Wells Brown had established his reputation as an articulate speaker, who when he was not ferrying self-emancipated people from Buffalo to Canada, spoke on the cruelties of slavery. On one speaking tour in 1844, he took the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad south from Sandusky into the heart of Ohio. Although he was used to segregated Jim Crow cars, this minor rail line’s passenger train compelled Black travelers to use the baggage car. Refusing this indignity, Brown found himself confronted by the conductor and a pair of enforcers who ejected him from the car. Yet, even when he hopped in the freight car, the conductor continued to harass him and demand a full fare.
This second encounter, which took place near the route’s stop in Tiffin, Ohio, reveals that humiliation and extortion were routine experiences for African American rail passengers. Still, the intrepid resistance of passengers such as Brown played a crucial role in the gradual desegregation of this transit network. Brown refuses the conductor’s demand of $1.25 (about $75 today) and negotiates down to 37 cents, on grounds that he has been treated as cargo, which traveled at 25 cents per hundred pounds.
In both encounters Brown humorously undercuts the railroad’s institutionalized racism, but his resistance demonstrates that the railroad sustained a system of evaluating Black bodies with roots in the transatlantic slave trade. One the one hand, the conductor attempted to exclude Brown from the status of passenger, at one point asking, “you think yourself as good as white people, I suppose?” One the other hand, he attempts to charge a rate for human passengers, rather than for freight. By pressing the issue, Brown forces the conductor to choose his system of measurement. It seems that even a free Black man still was evaluated like an enslaved person crammed as cargo into the belly of a ship. Nevertheless, Brown’s confrontation undermined one logical fallacy among the many that continued to shape American travel.