PDF The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks) by Edward E. Curtis IV in History

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Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet; in the United States; freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers;" activists who relied on steamships; stagecoaches; and railroads to expand their networks and to fight slavery and racism. They refused to ride in "Jim Crow" railroad cars; fought for the right to hold a U.S. passport (and citizenship); and during their transatlantic voyages; demonstrated their radical abolitionism. By focusing on the myriad strategies of black protest; including the assertions of gendered freedom and citizenship; this book tells the story of how the basic act of traveling emerged as a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the Civil War.Drawing on exhaustive research from U.S. and British newspapers; journals; narratives; and letters; as well as firsthand accounts of such figures as Frederick Douglass; Harriet Jacobs; and William Wells Brown; Pryor illustrates how; in the quest for citizenship; colored travelers constructed ideas about respectability and challenged racist ideologies that made black mobility a crime.