The League is thrilled to host acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin for an author talk as part of our Preservation Book Club. She will be doing a short reading from her book Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights followed by a conversation with League President Jay DiLorenzo including audience Q&A.
Click here to register.
Thank you to our sponsor Peggy N & Roger G Gerry Charitable Trust.
In Driving While Black, the acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin reveals how the car--the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility--has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. She recounts the creation of a parallel, unseen world of black motorists, who relied on travel guides, black only businesses, and informal communications networks to keep them safe. From coast to coast, mom and pop guest houses and tourist homes, beauty parlors, and even large hotels--including New York's Hotel Theresa, the Hampton House in Miami, or the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles--as well as night clubs and restaurants like New Orleans' Dooky Chase and Atlanta's Paschal's, fed travelers and provided places to stay the night. At the heart of Sorin's story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, a travel guide begun in 1936, which helped grant black Americans that most basic American rite, the family vacation.
As Sorin demonstrates, black travel guides and black-only businesses encouraged a new way of resisting oppression. Black Americans could be confident of finding welcoming establishments as they traveled for vacation or for business. Civil Rights workers learned where to stay and where to eat in the South between marches and protests. As Driving While Black reminds us, the Civil Rights Movement was just that--a movement of black people and their allies in defiance of local law and custom. At the same time, she shows that the car, despite the freedoms it offered, brought black people up against new challenges, from segregated ambulance services to unwarranted traffic stops, and the racist violence that too often followed.
Interwoven with Sorin's own family history and enhanced by dozens of little known images, Driving While Black charts how the automobile fundamentally reshaped African American life, and opens up an entirely new view onto one of the most important issues of our time.
Gretchen Sullivan Sorin is Director and Distinguished Service Professor at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, a training program for museum curators, educators, and directors that is part of the State University of New York College at Oneonta. She is also a Fellow of the New York Academy of historians.
Dr. Sorin holds a B.A. degree from Rutgers University in American Studies, an M.A. in Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program and a Ph.D. from the University at Albany in American history. Dr. Sorin has more than thirty years of experience in the museum profession working for more than 250 museums as a museum exhibition curator and education, programming, and interpretive planning and strategic planning consultant. She has served as a guest curator for many exhibitions. Major exhibitions include, In the Sprit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art; the nationally acclaimed traveling exhibition, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews for the Jewish Museum in New York; the award-winning Wilderness Cure: Tuberculosis and the Adirondacks for the Adirondack Museum, It All Happened at the Audubon, A History of the Audubon Ballroom for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Dvorak: Culture and Society in the 19th Century, for the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies and Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.
Active in the museum community Dr. Sorin has served on the boards or governing councils of organizations including The New York Folklore Society, The American Association for State and Local History, the 1772 Foundation, the New York State Parks Commission, The Directors’ Council of the Historic House Trust, The American Association for State and Local History, The Seward House Foundation and the American Association of Museums Committees on Museum Professional Training and Nominations. She is currently the President of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, and a member of The New York State Regents Advisory Board.
Dr. Sorin is the recipient of the Katherine Coffey Award from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, the Thurgood Marshall Unity Award from the Oneonta NAACP, the Philip Jones National Ephemera Society Fellowship Research Award, the State University of New York Chancellor’s Research Award, and the Chancellor’s Award for Research and Creative Activities. In 2006 she was named to the rank of Distinguished Service professor. SUNY distinguished ranks are conferred for sustained effort in the application of intellectual skills drawing from the candidate’s scholarly research interests to issues of public concern. In 2018 she was named to the list of distinguished alumni by the State University of New York College at Oneonta. For the past 20 years Sorin has worked to broaden representation in the museum field for underrepresented groups.
Dr. Sorin writes and lectures frequently on museum practice, diversity and inclusion, and African American history. Her books include Touring Historic Harlem, Four Walks in Northern Manhattan with architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art and Case Studies in Cultural Entrepreneurship: How to Create Relevant and Sustainable Institutions. She is the author of Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights published by
W. W. Norton/Liveright in 2020. Sorin is also co-writer and senior historian working with Steeplechase Films and filmmaker Ric Burns on a documentary film, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility that aired nationwide on PBS on October 13, 2020.