1Automobiles significantly changed access to leisure for Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, spawning interest in and growth of resort towns like Miami and West Palm Beach, Florida. Florida was one of the most dangerous places for Black Americans at the time; white Americans lynched Black Americans at the highest rate of any state in the South between 1890 and 1930 (McLeod, 2019, p. 29). The occupation of chauffeur was a site of both class conflict and anti-Black terror, shaping local touristic settings from the advent of driving along white supremacist lines. At stake was access to a commodity and a profession with an exhilarating potential to upend social, political and economic norms, remolding communities in ways that promised leisure for local Black motorists, chauffeurs, and vacationers.
2Just as early-twentieth-century Miami can be posited as a cosmopolitan borderland region between Spanish, British, and American empires, the car itself operated as a liminal site of subjectivity in which chauffeurs determined some parameters of their access to both work and leisure. The automobile—a material space of physical and emotional negotiation—helped transform Miami from a former Tequesta ancestral home and settler-colonial outpost into a site of consumption-oriented identities. I argue that Black chauffeurs in Miami were at the vanguard of efforts by local Black communities to create and claim pleasurable space and its attendant leisure via driving in a profoundly racist touristic climate.
3To make the above argument, this article analyzes Black chauffeurs’ pursuit of work and leisure in early-twentieth-century Miami. Three main contributions follow, expanding conversations within the field of tourism studies, the historiography of driving, and mobility studies. Within tourism studies, this article contributes an analysis of the important occupation of chauffeur. This analysis extends existing scholarship on the experiences of service workers in the leisure industry as well as a growing body of literature on the history of tourism and the history of racialization in Miami. Recent studies have highlighted both the binary practices of racialization experienced by Miami’s Bahamian communities at the beginning of the twentieth century and the fluidity of identity in the ‘Latinization’ of Miami decades prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution (McLeod, 2019; Capó Jr., 2017; Rose, 2015). Yet the important occupation of chauffeur and its contested character remain under-examined.
4This article contributes to the historiography of driving and of labor, one of the first studies of the founding of Black chauffeurs’ clubs, which operated across the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century as mini-unions. As a setting in which Black motorists’ right to drive was deeply contested, Miami is one of the only examples of chauffeuring for Black motorists during the first two decades of the twentieth century to be referenced in multiple secondary sources (Bay, 2021; Castillo, 2000; George, 1979). Few studies to date have analyzed the occupation of chauffeur and the ways in which driving shaped Black Americans’ access to leisure and work in the first two decades of the twentieth century (Bay, 2021; Borg, 2007). Analysis of chauffeuring in Miami, a city incorporated in 1896 in large part to facilitate white leisure via tourism, puts into relief class tensions and racialized semiotics of consumption within the space of the car. This case study of driving in Miami elucidates racialized, gendered, and classed meaning making in and around the leisure-oriented setting of cars in the first several decades of the automotive century.
5Within mobility studies, this article establishes the space of the car as one that allowed the frequently simultaneous pursuit of both work and pleasure in driving. I foreground the practice of driving oneself, the significance of which Paul Gilroy has termed ‘automotivity’ (Gilroy, 2010). Unlike the word ‘automobility,’ which references the practice of driving a car, ‘automotivity’ emphasizes the personal agency inherent in the act of driving. Emphatically relevant to experiences of mobility and racialization, automotivity evokes the self-reflexive ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, whose palimpsestic transposing of time, space, and ‘spirit’ frequently entailed the medium of driving, in Florida, and elsewhere (Brooks, 2021; Stewart, 2021; Hurston, 1945, 1935). Automotivity speaks to the profound “emotional and kinesthetic” significance of driving for Black motorists in “resisting and surviving White supremacy” (Alderman et al., 2019, p. 10; Alderman and Inwood, 2014, p. 8). My analysis of the dual use of the car for labor and leisure departs from Paul Gilroy’s portrayal of the car as a primarily pleasure-inducing commodity that implicates consumers in a straightforward political ontology and moral economy of consumption. This departure exposes a conventional political ontology of automobility as fraught and contestable.
6To read about the history of driving in the first two decades of the twentieth-century United States is to encounter the erasure of Black drivers. This erasure has been posited within mobility studies by Michael Pesses as “an overall absence of true critical reflection within geographic and historical study and a production of ‘white supremacy’ […]” (Pesses, 2017, p. 679; Berg, 2012). This production of white supremacy is especially significant in light of Paul Gilroy’s positing of the private automobile as “a kind of ur-commodity lodged at the meeting point: the crossroads of moral and economic relations” (Gilroy, 2010, p. 13). Echoing myriad Black studies theorists, Gilroy writes of the “metaphysical potency of racism” and the general unwillingness of academics to feature histories of racism in ways that highlight mutually constitutive categories of difference (Gilroy, 2010, p. 73; Weheliye, 2014a, 2014b; Spillers, 2006). This frequently leads to analysis of space in which categories of racialization (e.g., ‘white’ and ‘Black’) violently forged in segregated settings are accepted as a given, and the vectors of time and space that actively contribute to the constitution and maintenance of these categories are under-examined. Highlighting the significance of racialization to the field of geography, Perry L. Carter argues, “differences between White and Black travel preferences, at least in the realm of leisure travel, are either superficial or are artifacts of the nation’s racial history” (Carter, 2008, p. 267).
7Scholars have only begun to investigate the ‘metaphysical potency of racism’ in driving and artifacts of racialization in cars at the beginning of the automotive century. Mia Bay is the first historian to analyze the driving experiences of Black motorists in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a central part of her examination of the history of Black mobility (Bay, 2021). Two of the most recognized historians of American automobility, James Flink and Cotten Seiler, implicitly posit driving by Black motorists as tangential, rather than foundational, to the practice of liberal ‘democratic’ motoring in the United States (Flink, 1988, 1975, 1970; Seiler, 2008). Legal historian Sarah Seo analyzes rates of car ownership and driving by Black Americans in the 1910s and 1920s as reported by the United States Census Bureau, finding the results inconclusive (Seo, 2019, p. 32). Gretchen Sorin and Candacy Taylor, authors of two groundbreaking, comprehensive histories of driving for members of Black American communities in the mid-twentieth century, do not address the experience of driving in the first several decades of the century in detail (Sorin, 2020; Taylor, 2020).
- 1 These two newspapers were white-owned and operated. The city’s first Black-owned and operated newsp (...)
8This article is structured in two parts: theoretical background and historical case study. I begin my analysis with a discussion of racialized (im)mobility and leisure in Florida and in the United States at large at the turn of the twentieth century. I then turn to analysis of the experience of automotivity for early Black motorists, many of whom were employed as chauffeurs. I establish the space of the car as one that allowed the frequently simultaneous pursuit of both work and pleasure in driving. I then put this analysis to a case study of early Black motorists’ access to labor and leisure in cars in Miami, for which I analyze articles from two historical newspapers, the Miami Herald and the Miami Metropolis.1 Situating the start of my analysis with the patenting of automobiles in 1895 and the incorporation of Miami in 1896, I conclude the article in 1920. By 1920, Black motorists in Miami represented close to half of all drivers in the city, up from an almost total prohibition on Black automotivity in Miami just a few years prior (Castillo, 2000, p. 97-98). Analyzing Black chauffeurs’ efforts to claim space in cars in Miami during this time period highlights the importance of driving for early Black motorists at large and the significance of the car as a site of labor and pleasure in otherwise violent white supremacist settings.
- 2 “An ACT to prevent the future migration of Free Negroes and Mulattoes to this Territory, and for ot (...)
9The pursuit of leisure in settler-colonial Florida prior to the twentieth century was largely delineated along racialized lines. Settler Floridians policed the semiosis (production of meaning via signs and symbols) of race via practices of terror in mobility-oriented settings. Nineteenth-century restrictions on Black mobility in Florida spoke to the profound capacity of the movement of sailors on ships from the Caribbean to alter local racialized subjectivities. White Floridians implemented terrorizing juridical restrictions like the Seaman Act of 1832, enacted in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton, Virginia in 1831. This law made the entry of ‘free’ Black people (such as Bahamian sailors) into Florida illegal and stipulated that the person seeking entry be sold into slavery for five years for the second alleged offense.2 White Floridians practiced extralegal terror via lynching to undermine Black mobility to and within the state.
10Restrictions on mobility were foundational to the continual production of racialized meaning across the United States during enslavement and afterwards. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor writes of ‘public conveyances’ in the antebellum era, “To assert white authority in these spaces, stagecoach drivers, steamship captains, railroad conductors, and white passengers threatened, insulted, and forcibly ousted colored travelers to insist that access was white-only domain” (Pryor, 2016, p. 45). Black Americans in the late-nineteenth century and beyond experienced continued legal racial segregation in public spaces, a practice sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Black passengers at the turn of the twentieth century frequently reported train travel as humiliating. The experience of humiliation on public transportation is arguably the most persistent trope in the historiography of the Jim Crow era, from roughly 1896 to 1965 (Wells, 2014; Pickens, 1923; Du Bois, 1920, 1903). Humiliation was not merely personal; it was an intersubjective experience that made race real (Sorin, 2020; Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Holloway, 2013).
11A powerful account of humiliation, leisure, and mobility comes from William Pickens, a prominent Black scholar, orator, and activist who wrote and spoke widely on the emotional terror of segregated train travel. Pickens frequently engaged in Black studies as a ‘mode of knowledge production’ while riding trains during his decades of employment as director of branches with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Weheliye, 2014b, p. 18). He wrote in typical fashion for The Nation in 1923:
- 3 William Pickens, “Jim Crow in Texas,” The Nation, 1923.
I sit in a Jim Crow as I write, between El Paso and San Antonio, Texas. The Jim Crow car is not merely an institution to ‘separate the races’; it is a contrivance to humiliate and harass the colored people and to torture them with a finesse unequaled by the cruelest genius in the heathen world. The cruder genius broke the bodies of individuals occasionally, but Jim Crow tortures the bodies and souls of tens of thousands hourly.3
12Pickens’ unique power as a scholar lay in the juxtaposition of impediments to desired physical mobility (in this case, high-speed travel between El Paso and San Antonio) and the conjuring of an affective world—humiliation, harassment, and torture—that laid bare the ontological horizons of modern temporalities, torturing “the bodies and souls of tens of thousands hourly.” Not only was the affective space of the segregated train car torturous to Pickens in its relentless degradation of Black passengers, Pickens elsewhere made explicit that the everyday torture of humiliation on trains was worse than the threat of lynching.
13The threat of lynching and the experience of being racialized via humiliation in everyday public settings were, as Pickens knew and implied, mutually constitutive rather than discrete. “To the Editor of the Evening Post,” Pickens once wrote in response to a newspaper editor’s request for explanations for the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North after World War I:
- 4 William Pickens, “On ‘Causes of Migration,’” in: Malaika Adero, ed., Up South: Stories, Studies, an (...)
Sir: The cause is complex and many-angled, not simple and categorical. Perhaps the greatest element of all is the Jim Crow car. It is worse than lynching; lynching occasionally kills one man; the Jim Crow Car perpetually tortures ten thousand.4
14This stance that the Jim Crow car “is worse than lynching” is revealing of the ontological stakes of humiliation, which threatened one’s metaphysical right to exist. This discussion of humiliation and terror evidences what Derek Alderman calls a ‘biopolitics of mobility.’ “From a biopolitical perspective,” Alderman writes, “discrimination in tourism is part of a larger history and geography of controlling black bodies, lives, and affects” (Alderman, 2018, p. 718). Calvin Warren takes the biopolitics of mobility further, theorizing ‘ontological terror’ as a frame for beginning to address the metaphysical constraints of racialization. Warren explores the concept of “temporality without duration,” positing that blackness exists in a time without space, a space without time (Warren, 2018, p. 97). Blackness is an idea—“the nodal point of semiotics,” Warren writes—that provides order to an anti-Black world (Warren, 2018, p. 149).
15In early 1920, William Pickens witnessed the shooting of a Black carriage driver—a student—while Pickens was employed as head of the department of Greek and sociology at Wiley College (Pickens, 1923, p. 165). The historically Black college (HBCU), founded in 1873, was run by the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church in Marshall, Texas, “only forty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana,—one of the worst sections in all this round world, certainly for any Negro to live in” (Pickens, 1923, p. 169). Pickens relates in Bursting Bonds: The Autobiography of a ‘New Negro’ that “the white population of the town and county had not yet conceded a human status to the colored people, who greatly outnumbered the white” (Pickens, 1923, p. 170-171). He continues, addressing the hazardous space of the road for Black motorists and pedestrians:
In addition to the usual oppression of Jim Crowism, disenfranchisement, segregation, and the denial of public accommodation and privilege, colored individuals were visited with occasional beating and bullying in the highways and the awful terror of lynching (Pickens, 1923, p. 171).
16Pickens corroborates his account of the terror of the open road with a story about a student who drove the president of the college’s carriage, “selected for that position because he was polite, tactful, level-headed, and would know how to get through the streets of this dangerous community” (Pickens, 1923, p. 173).
17A “pound officer” shot the student—“emptied his six-shooter at the boy”—while he was out driving one day in January 1920 (Pickens, 1923, p. 173). “This is why:” Pickens writes,
while the boy was driving the president’s carriage, a vehicle known to all the whites of the town, keeping close to the right-hand curb, the pound officer came from the opposite direction in his buggy, staying right in the middle of the street, so that his buggy just barely touched the vehicle driven by the boy. Neither vehicle was injured in the slightest, and so light was the touch that the boy barely perceived it, as he drove along laughing and talking to another boy on the seat beside him. The officer simply stepped out of his buggy and emptied his gun at the back of the body of this boy (Pickens, 1923, p. 174).
18Especially significant to this anecdote is the fact that the boys in the front seat, driver and passenger, had been “laughing and talking,” enjoying themselves. The pound officer both provoked the incident by driving in the middle of the street, taking up extra public space, and terrorized the boys by shooting the driver in an apparent reaction to the students’ joy and vitality. A second officer who came to investigate the scene continued the terrorization, hurling racial epithets at the student, who had been shot in the legs, and saying, “I’d shoot him, too!” (Pickens, 1923, p. 174). Witnesses to the scene eventually helped get the original officer “indicted, tried and lightly fined,” but he appealed the case and nothing more came of the indictment (Pickens, 1923, p. 175).
19Black studies scholars, geographers and historians have written of the terror of the open road, such as that perpetrated by the officer who shot the student chauffeur in Wiley, Texas in 1920, and the imperative for Black motorists to follow the protective travel recommendations of guide books, the most famous and examined of which is Victor H. Green’s Green Book for Negro Motorists (Bay, 2021; Taylor, 2020; Sorin, 2020; Alderman et al., 2019; Pesses, 2017; Alderman and Inwood, 2014; Hall, 2015; Holloway, 2013; Gilroy, 2010; Green, 1936-1966). “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Jonathan Scott Holloway writes, “but the Green Book and Travelguide [a competitor guide] were trying to keep African Americans alive” (Holloway, 2013, p. 71). Reiterating the ontological terror that undergirded Black Americans’ interest in driving, Gretchen Sorin credits “the overarching, if unstated goal of all these travel guidebooks” of “keeping African Americans from being killed on the road” (Sorin, 2020, p. 165).
20Pleasure in travel and tourism against the backdrop of humiliation, fear, and terror in practices of racialization is an analytical frame absent from many historical accounts of driving for Black Americans (Alderman et al., 2019, p. 3). As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes in theorizing a ‘racial economy of emotions,’
Work on RE [“racialized emotions”] has mostly focused on “negative” emotions, such as Whites’ hatred and anger (Pardy 2010), and the sadness, anxiety, and shame of the racially subaltern (Wilkins and Pace 2014). This approach seriously limits our understanding of RE, as all actors experience the full range of emotions. (Bonilla-Silva, 2019, p. 8)
21Examining the roles of pleasure and joy in driving is imperative to understanding the historical appeal of automotivity for Black Americans. “While all Americans—white and black—enjoyed the freedom and privacy that the automobile afforded,” Gretchen Sorin writes, “these advantages were more profound for black Americans” (Sorin, 2020, p. 38). In a world whose public contours nationwide were defined by terror and humiliation, cars promised Black drivers a semi-private escape into pleasure via leisure.
22Automobiles and their attendant capacities for shifts in semiosis were, from their advent, more complex than those of trains. Much as trains were a technology that frequently elicited humiliation for Black passengers, cars provided many Black motorists opportunities to experience the world on their own terms, including in pursuit of pleasure and joy (Sorin, 2020; Gilroy, 2010). Black drivers in the early twentieth century experienced automotivity as radical physical mobility and emotional freedom that engendered new spatial and temporal realities. Members of Black communities across the United States embraced the early automobile as a vehicle of self-representation, enjoying car-based worlds of their own making.
23Cars enabled access to multifaceted realms of spatial, temporal, economic, affective and emotional mobility that other consumption-oriented settings did not. Genevieve Carpio describes the automobile as “a symbolic system through which personhood was given meaning” (Carpio, 2019, p. 143). Long before the Green Book and competitor travel guides like William H. Butler’s Travelguide: Vacation & Recreation without Humiliation made explicit the relationship between humiliation-avoidance and pleasure-seeking for Black motorists, Black drivers, including chauffeurs, posited themselves as quintessentially modern consumers of time and space in the leisure-oriented setting of the car (Pesses, 2017; Butler, 1947-1957; Green, 1936-1966). Opposition to Black automotivity was strongest in settings where modern subjectivities—identities enriched by access to consumer goods—were most at stake.
- 5 “Good News from Madam Walker: Energetic Indiana Businesswoman Wins Success Abroad: Honored in Many (...)
24Keenly aware of the significance of self-representation in the consumptive practice of automotivity, wealthy American entrepreneurs like women’s beauty magnate Madam C. J. Walker and world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson helped establish the private vehicle as a celebratory, semi-private space for Black motorists in the early twentieth century (Bay, 2021; Gilroy, 2010). Madam C. J. Walker was known to leak news of her pleasure in driving to the press. An article reporting a 1914 business trip by Walker to Jamaica stated: “Her chief delight, as she puts it, was in taking long trips in her car with friends from city to city in this most beautiful country.”5 Walker’s trip to Jamaica is evidence of the automobile’s capacity to facilitate simultaneous access to labor and leisure. The setting of Walker’s joyrides in Jamaica hints at a fluid semiosis of vacationing in the Caribbean, while the article’s description of driving as Walker’s “chief delight” points to the joyful sense of mobility cars facilitated for tourists of the era (Williams, 2018).
Image 1
- 6 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Publi (...)
Madam C. J. Walker (driving) with (left to right) her niece, Anjetta Breedlove; Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company factory manager, Alice Kelly; and Walker Company bookkeeper, Lucy Flint, in 1911.6
- 7 Madam C. J. Walker employed a chauffeur, Otho Patton, in some settings, such as road trips from Ind (...)
25Madam C. J. Walker, depicted in a 1911 photograph at the wheel of her Ford Model T on a New York City street chauffeuring her niece, Anjetta Breedlove, and two employees, Alice Kelly, and Lucy Flint, is a commanding presence.7 Walker presents herself as a motorist par excellence, with mastery of both the technical and mechanical aspects of driving. The flamboyant, fanciful feather in her hat is anything but somber, marking her automotive experience as one of leisure. Walker, who could have chosen to photograph herself alone in what seems like a staged studio portrait, chose to include her niece and two employees, rendering the car a celebratory space of Black womanhood as much as one of personal achievement and status. This choice indicates that the space of the early automobile was a social space, one in which Walker’s wealth and prestige could be read against the backdrop of her companions’ chic but more understated fashion choices. The roof of the vehicle is open, allowing for maximum visibility of the car’s occupants and rendering the Ford a decidedly public space. Walker has placed her left hand on the wheel in apparent anticipation of driving; the four women in the car are poised to move, and it seems that a single feather may be left in their wake.
26Automotivity, such as that exhibited by Madam C. J. Walker, had a brief history in the United States prior to the twentieth century. Train travel had taken hold of the country in the 1860s and was supplemented by selective use of the bicycle for long-distance travel in the mid-1880s. In anticipation of more comfortable joyrides, wealthy bicycle hobbyists formed the League of American Wheelmen in 1880 to improve America’s roads and highways. By 1897, the League’s constitution and by-laws stipulated racialized membership exclusively for “Any amateur white wheelman of good character […]” (Bassett, 1897, p. 4). The National League for Good Roads, founded in 1893, furthered the mission of the League and put into motion a national focus on road building that came to be known as the Good Roads Movement. This movement, with its origins in the pursuit of [white] leisure, culminated in the eventual establishment of the Interstate Highway System (Flink, 1988, p. 4-5). A flurry of development of automobiles in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century led to numerous concurrent automobile patents in 1895. Ford Motor Company opened by 1904, and the first Black-owned automobile production company, C. R. Patterson & Sons of Greenfield, Ohio, was established as a carriage manufacturer in 1865 and began manufacturing automobiles in 1915 (Nelson, 2010, p. 1).
- 8 “Four Dallas Negroes in Auto Worry Police: Detectives Hard to Convince that Jack Johnsons Have Righ (...)
27An anecdote from the second decade of chauffeuring and automotivity in the United States speaks to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theorization of a ‘racial economy of emotions’ and Saidiya Hartman’s seminal examination of the ‘economy of pleasure’ during enslavement and in what she terms the ‘afterlife of slavery’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Hartman, 2007, 1997). In April 1911, four Black men driving together through Fort Worth (Texas) were arrested by two separate police officers within twenty minutes—each time on the suspicion they were driving a stolen vehicle. In fact, the driver of the vehicle was the personal chauffeur of a white man from Dallas and had been given explicit permission to take his friends on a “joy ride” to the nearby city. A third police officer had apparently contemplated arresting the men earlier in the day because of their race but decided against it because they were “moving along the street so slowly.”8 Time, it seemed, operated differently when correlated with blackness.
28Calvin Warren writes, “Black existence (what you see when you look at a black body, for example) is not anything representation can incorporate into its epistemology” (Warren, 2018, p. 150). The alleged confusion of the police officers who stopped the car to arrest the men inside before admitting that there was no ground for arrest speaks to the volatility of the semiotics of racialization in cars. The very fact of four Black men moving in an automobile, however slowly, contradicted the metaphysical contours of reality with which the presumably white police officers were familiar. Four Black men moving through time at a pace of their own choosing is an example of Fred Moten’s theorization of ‘paraontological’ transcendence (Warren, 2017; Moten, 2017). Four Black men occupying space constitutive of time is transcendent. Four Black men likely enjoying themselves (implied in the words “joy ride”) while occupying space and transforming time is transcendent.
29At the beginning of the twentieth century, cars were worldmaking devices—at times, microcosms of the worlds Black drivers and passengers wished to inhabit. How must it have felt to move, however fleetingly, as one pleased in the heart of Texas less than fifty years after the end of the Civil War? What emotions did the occupants of the automobile in the above anecdote experience on the ride from Dallas to Fort Worth? How familiar was the conflation of “so slowly” and ‘too fast’ in the officers’ racialization of the car’s occupants? Cars altered the experience of time for drivers and passengers, allowing space to breathe, and live, while moving.
30Black motorists worked hard at times to deflect public attention, moving slowly like the men in the anecdote above, appearing eager to work, and thus rendering the car a semi-private space with the capacity for pleasure and abandon. Was the driver of the car on the “joy ride” to Fort Worth really a chauffeur, the humble servant of a white man in Dallas, or did he own the vehicle as the entrepreneurs Madam C. J. Walker and Jack Johnson owned theirs? A chauffeur’s hat was one of many theatrical props used by Black motorists to deflect attention from police officers suspicious of their access to cars, reconfiguring the semiotics of driving while Black and cementing an affiliation with servitude rather than consumption (Taylor, 2020, p. 9-10, 26-28).
- 9 “Heaven for Motorists; Trip into Mexico Most Picturesque,” Morning Oregonian, Aug. 1, 1915, 14.
31The earliest buyers of cars in the United States were dilettantes, doctors, businessmen and engineers (Flink, 1988, p. 28). Yet operating an automobile at the beginning of the twentieth century required significant skill and mechanical training, and wealthy owners of cars typically employed chauffeurs to drive them around. The mechanical knowledge and skill required made the job of chauffeur both sophisticated and sought-after, conferring social status and the prospect of steady employment upon those with the requisite experience.9 Chauffeurs around the country at the beginning of the twentieth century were racially diverse, including Black, white, Latinx, Native and Asian Americans. Working as a chauffeur contrasted markedly with the employment status of the vast majority of Black Americans at the turn of the century, ninety percent of whom were agricultural workers and around ten percent of whom were non-salaried wageworkers located mainly in the North (Zieger, 2007, p. 52; Du Bois, 1902, p. 22).
- 10 “Four Dallas Negroes in Auto Worry Police”; “Chauffeur’s Union to Stop Joy-Riding: Negro Auto Drive (...)
32The first Black drivers in the United States faced a maze of new opportunities in the putatively uncharted territory of driving culture. With a car, one could theoretically travel at whim, bypassing the confines of racially segregated public transportation. One could earn a living as a mechanic and a driver, organizing with other skilled chauffeurs to demand higher wages. Chauffeurs could escape the provincialism of agricultural work and enter the cosmopolitan world of consumption, deriving elevated social status and pleasure from increased access to commercial goods. Chauffeurs frequently took their employers’ cars out joyriding after hours, sometimes with permission from the car owner (Borg, 2007, p. 24-25, 28).10 Black men and women’s expertise in driving and in mechanics as well as their access to the affective realms of leisure while chauffeuring have been largely forgotten in histories of this time period for members of Black communities.
- 11 Washington Bee, Aug. 20, 1910, 1.
- 12 “Most of State’s Auto Drivers Are Negroes: Average Age of Licensed Chauffeurs Is 22—Their Weight is (...)
- 13 “Colored Chauffeurs Association Advertisement,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 23, 1910, 4; “Negro Cha (...)
33There were approximately 460,000 vehicles registered in the United States by 1910, and over 4,500 Black male chauffeurs employed nationally the same year, including 490 in New York City and 312 in Philadelphia. Black female drivers were rare at the time, although the Washington Bee reported, “In Paris there are dozens of colored women who are employed as chauffeurs and cab drivers.”11 Black chauffeurs comprised more than twenty-three percent of chauffeurs employed in St. Louis in 1910, and over seventeen percent of chauffeurs employed in Philadelphia at the time (Borg, 2007, p. 21). By 1912, Black men working as chauffeurs were employed in communities across the United States and made up a majority of licensed drivers in states like Alabama (Johnston and Woodson, 1930, p. 112).12 While few Black Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century could afford to purchase cars, economic, political, and social possibilities afforded by automotivity via chauffeuring abounded. The occupation of chauffeur quickly inspired solidarity between Black drivers in cities such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Macon, Georgia, and animosity on the part of white chauffeurs from Boston and New York to Chattanooga, Tennessee and West Palm Beach, Florida.13
- 14 “Spark Plugs and Speedometers,” Salt Lake Herald, July 28. 1907, 9.
- 15 Advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 23, 1910, 4.
- 16 “Class for Colored Chauffeurs,” Evening Statesman, Feb. 28, 1910, 6; “Coachmen Often Are Reliable C (...)
- 17 “‘Negro Chauffeurs’ Club’ Applies for Charter,” Macon Daily Telegraph, Dec. 10, 1913, 11; “Two Comp (...)
34In reaction to vitriol and terror from white drivers around the country, Black chauffeurs began organizing chauffeurs’ clubs of their own. The Professional Colored Chauffeurs’ Club of America was organized in New York as early as 1907.14 Black chauffeurs advertised the location of a Colored Chauffeurs Association’ Headquarters in Philadelphia in 1910.15 Driving schools catering exclusively to Black men seeking employment as chauffeurs opened around the country from Buffalo, New York to Salt Lake City, Utah the same year.16 Black chauffeurs’ clubs had incorporated in Lexington, Kentucky and Macon, Georgia by 1913.17 Like comparable clubs across various professions in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America, these chauffeurs’ clubs operated as small-scale unions.
- 18 “Colored Chauffeurs Join AFL,” Washington Herald, Sept. 13, 1919, 3; Evening Star, Sept. 12, 1919, (...)
35Labor organizing in public transportation contexts has been established as essential to improved access to mobility for members of Black communities. Although cars were new, Black activists had been organizing labor in local and national arenas since at least the 1870s (Zieger, 2007, p. 25). My research indicates that a nationwide Black chauffeurs’ union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1919, six years before the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), a union of Black Pullman car employees organized by labor leader A. Philipp Randolph, famously did the same.18 While the history of the BSCP organizing foregrounds Black train porters as employees, hewing close to established tropes of blackness and work, an emphasis on chauffeuring reconfigures this narrative, highlighting Black motorists’ access to both work and leisure (joy riding) in cars.
- 19 “Colored Chauffeurs Reply to Mr. Lane: They Hold That All They Ask Is a Square Deal, and Give Argum (...)
- 20 “Shall Mob Law Rule in Miami?” Miami Herald, July 29, 1915, 4.
36Black chauffeurs embraced their transition from horse-drawn carriage to car as one of prestige, arguing that Black motorists were quintessentially modern in their early, exclusive mastery of the skill of driving.19 For some wealthy white automobile owners in the South, Black chauffeurs represented a continuation of the legacy of chattel slavery. A 1915 editorial in the Miami Herald stated, “In practically every southern city owners of cars have colored chauffeurs. In Atlanta, for instance, a majority of the privately owned machines are driven by negroes, the same as the carriages of the southern gentlemen were driven years ago.”20 While white residents of some locales around the country clung to traditions of racialized servitude in employing Black chauffeurs in the first decades of the century, white members of consumption-oriented communities like Miami saw the social and economic mobility the car afforded as a threat, fighting the presence of Black motorists in any iteration. No one cosmopolitan setting in the first several decades of the twentieth-century United States more consistently evidenced the potential of cars to dramatically shape practices of labor and leisure than Miami, Florida.
37Some of the staunchest advocacy of racial differentiation and segregation in the automobile world in the 1910s came from resort cities like Miami, Florida, where few Black chauffeurs were successfully employed for much of the decade. Miami was incorporated in 1896, one year after automobiles were patented concurrently in both the United States and Europe and the same year that Miami was connected to points north by railway. Forty-three percent of registered male voters who voted for Miami’s incorporation (162 of 368 people) were Black (McLeod, 2019, p. 31). By 1910, there were just over 2,550 Black residents of Miami, who represented almost forty-two percent of the city’s total population (Dunn, 1997, p. 77). While almost no Black chauffeurs or motorists drove cars in Miami in 1910 despite comprising a large percentage of the city’s population, Black chauffeurs comprised a third of Miami’s chauffeurs and Black residents a third of the city’s population by 1920 (Castillo, 2000, p. 97-98). Due to the persistence of Black chauffeurs in the face of white supremacist terror, the car became an important space of labor and leisure for members of Miami’s Black communities.
38The center of tourism in early-twentieth-century Miami was the Royal Palm Hotel, a building owned by a white industrialist (Henry Flagler) and built largely by Black workers. The hotel was constructed in 1896 on top of a Tequesta burial mound, a site where Indigenous inhabitants of the region had buried their dead, likely for centuries prior to and after the arrival of the Spanish in the region in the early sixteenth century (Dunn, 1997, p. 53). This violent form of palimpsestic colonial consumption evidences Julio Capó Jr.’s observation that “Miami’s fairyland tourism operated on the premise of marketing several forms of colonial conquest” (Capó Jr., 2017, pp. 8-9). As Kyle Whyte, Jared L. Talley and Julia D. Gibson elucidate, “settler mobility has to be inscribed into the landscapes to ecosystems of the people already living there (i.e., Indigenous peoples).” Settler societies “carve” their institutions “into the waters, soils, air, and other environmental dimensions of the territory or landscape” (Whyte et al., 2019, p. 326). The Royal Palm Hotel thrived economically as a center of white settler-colonial leisure carved into the local Indigenous landscape.
- 21 “Negro Chauffeur Question Be Decided at Meeting Thursday: Entire Chamber of Commerce Called to Meet (...)
39While some tourists took the train south, employing chauffeurs upon disembarking, tourism to Miami via automobile from Boston and other far-flung northern cities boomed. Many of Miami’s prospective vacationers in the 1910s employed Black chauffeurs. Chauffeuring was an occupation that threatened to subvert aspects of the system of racial capitalism undergirding white leisure in Miami (Robinson, 2019, 1983).21 Chauffeuring was a skilled profession that enabled prestige, wealth, and leisure in the form of joyriding as well as pleasure for the Black tourists and local residents whom Black Miamians could chauffeur. Black Miamians were crucial to the local tourism industry, working in building and road construction and in the service and entertainment industries. Nathan Connolly writes, “At practically every site of white leisure, nonwhite servitude proved integral to the everyday theatrics and comforts of seaside recreation” (Connolly, 2014, p. 24). Yet Black tourists were barred from many sites of recreation in Jim Crow Florida, from parks to pools to movie theaters and dressing rooms in department stores (McLeod, 2019, p. 29).
- 22 “Chauffeur’s Union Tonight,” Miami Metropolis, Nov. 27, 1911, 1.
- 23 Crisis, Sept. 1913, 225.
- 24 “The Trials of A Negro Chauffeur: One Drove Into Miami Yesterday From Palm Beach, But Returned By T (...)
- 25 “Frazier Came to Death in Automobile Accident Coroner Jury’s Verdict: Wire Found in Wheel Gives Clu (...)
40White chauffeurs in Miami sought not only to exclude Black membership in their clubs, such as a chauffeurs’ union that was established by 1911, but also to prohibit Black motorists from driving in the city in any capacity.22 Mia Bay writes, “The Miami Chamber of Commerce banned Negro chauffeurs before World War I,” and white chauffeurs worked to enforce the ban (Bay, 2021, p. 111). There were approximately 300 automobiles in regular operation in Miami in 1911 (George, 1977, p. 6). While there were 49 Black drivers listed in Miami’s city directory in 1913 and 76 listed in 1915, many of these were likely carriage drivers; only one Black chauffeur was documented for the same period (Castillo, 2000, p. 83). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s periodical, The Crisis, reported in 1913 that white chauffeurs in Miami assaulted and beat Black drivers of automobiles.23 White chauffeurs chased out of town a Black motorist who ventured into the city from West Palm Beach in 1915.24 An eyewitness to a contemporaneous automobile accident in Miami described a “great number of automobiles that were racing by, chasing a negro chauffeur.”25 The potency of automotivity, in contrast to driving a carriage, is blatant in these reports of terrorization of Black motorists.
41The occupation of chauffeur represented a racialized, gendered and classed arena of upward mobility. Newspaper coverage in the white press corroborated these facts, evidencing the mutually constitutive nature of racism and class identities. An editorialist in the Miami Herald argued,
- 26 “Not a Burning Question,” Miami Herald, Aug. 6, 1915, 4.
If negro men are able to take up the work of chauffeurs, it will be followed by garages operated by colored men in the white part of the city, and the color line once being broken, there will be nothing to prevent other colored business from coming in the white part of the city, and for colored residents to choose any part of the city they desire for their homes.26
- 27 “Anti-Negro Chauffeur Propaganda Endorsed by Suburban Improvers: Highland Park Improvement Associat (...)
- 28 “Turned Down Resolution,” Miami Herald, Oct. 13, 1915, 2.
42Members of a suburban homeowners organization, the North Miami Improvement Association, campaigned explicitly against the employment of Black chauffeurs in Miami in 1915.27 White supremacist association members fought efforts to “‘tell the world’ that Miami will protect tourists who might bring negro chauffeurs with them,” citing a “custom of long standing not to employ negro chauffeurs.”28 White workers barred Black workers of various industries from joining their unions in Miami with more consistency than in many other areas of the South (Castillo, 2004, p. 461). White chauffeurs not only refused Black chauffeurs union membership, but also largely prohibited Black chauffeurs from driving in Miami in the mid-1910s. White homeowners and chauffeurs worked in tandem with garage owners and the Miami Chamber of Commerce to inhibit Black automotivity in the city.
- 29 “Should Advise Tourists as to Feeling in Miami: No Negroes in Garages,” Miami Metropolis, July 30, (...)
- 30 “Judge Abbott Tells of Things Seen in Florida: Former Resident of Albuquerque Presents Interesting (...)
- 31 Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 20, 1908, 6; “Garages Join Fight on Negro Chauffeurs: All Local Dealers Si (...)
43The white owners of Miami’s Electric Garage and Avenue C Garage told reporters of the Miami Metropolis in 1915 that cars driven by Black chauffeurs were not welcome for repairs.29 The owner of the Avenue C Garage had reportedly hired a Black employee the previous year and found that white automobile owners boycotted his garage as a result. Some white garage owners insisted that Black chauffeurs work only as “helpers to mechanics.”30 Boycotting the presence of Black chauffeurs in garages in Miami was reminiscent of similar practices at the time in U.S. cities from Los Angeles, California to Fort Worth, Texas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New York.31 Cars, it seemed, were self-evidently vehicles of social and economic mobility in particularly volatile consumer settings. While Black residents of Miami were prohibited from working as mechanics, no comparable practice of racial segregation yet existed at Ocean Beach, later known as Miami Beach (Dunn, 1997, p. 62).
- 32 “Somebody Chased Colored Chauffeur into the Woods,” Miami Herald, July 30, 1916, 1.
44White chauffeurs, homeowners, employers, government officials and police officers continued to conspire against Black chauffeurs to make their employment in Miami untenable. In 1916, white drivers chased a Black chauffeur into the woods on the outskirts of town. Rather than reinforce access to automotivity for the owner of the car, Geder Walker, a Black man who was manager of the beloved Lyric Theater, and his chauffeur, a police officer chauffeured the car to a garage following the incident (Fields, 1974, p. 11).32 Instance of Black chauffeurs visiting Miami without experiencing bodily harm at the hands of white supremacists made headlines in 1917; the chauffeurs were sequestered in a hotel during the length of their stays and were given police protection.
- 33 “Negro Chauffeur Was Given Protection,” Miami Herald, Jan. 14, 1917, 1.
- 34 “Policemen Will Guard Car with Negro Chauffeur: Mayor Grants Request of Senator Camden of Kentucky (...)
- 35 “Negro Chauffeurs Replaced by White,” Miami Herald, March 25, 1917, 8.
45The owner of the car in this case, a white man from Virginia, took a train from Palm Beach and arranged for a police escort for the chauffeur from Palm Beach to the Royal Palm Hotel. The car owner hired a white chauffeur for the remainder of his stay.33 The mayor of Miami agreed to provide police protection for a Black chauffeur accompanying a high-profile white tourist, a senator from Kentucky, visiting Miami the same month.34 Yet two Black chauffeurs driving into Miami the same year were cornered by white chauffeurs and “informed that no negro drivers were permitted to operate automobiles in the city.” One of the Black chauffeurs, who resisted removal from his car, was reportedly arrested.35
- 36 “Tourists May Bring Their Own Drivers: Agreement is Reached by Which Negro Chauffeurs Will Not Be D (...)
- 37 “Race Difficulty Smoothed Out in Joint Conference: Committees of Whites and Negroes Reach Agreement (...)
- 38 Ibid. [Emphasis added.]
46Thousands of potential visitors to Miami who typically employed Black chauffeurs refused to visit the city in the late 1910s in protest of the effective ban on Black automotivity.36 Members of the Colored Board of Trade (CBT), a group of prominent Black businesspeople, threatened an “exodus” of Black Miamians in 1917 in response to white chauffeurs’ continued suppression of Black automotivity. This was a potent threat in a year—1917—when Miami turned away an estimated ten thousand visitors (Castillo, 2004, p. 442). Members of the CBT advocated “for protection in the right of negroes to drive their own cars, for business and pleasure.”37 The Miami Metropolis reported CBT members as stating, “Miami is the only city in the country where the authorities have attempted to draw the color line by permitting white chauffeurs to intimidate negro drivers without police interference.”38
- 39 “Negro, Defending Himself against Whites, Cuts One: White Chauffeurs Chase Fred Andrews, Who Was Dr (...)
- 40 “White Chauffeurs Believed to Have Dynamited Hall: Police and Sheriff Seem Unable to Cope with Situ (...)
47Days earlier, a Black chauffeur named Fred Andrews was chased through the segregated Colored Town (later known as Overtown) in Miami by white chauffeurs “in an effort to put a stop to his running a car for hire.” Andrews allegedly cut one of the white chauffeurs on the hand with a knife.39 White supremacists believed to have been chauffeurs responded by bombing a cultural center in Colored Town, Off Fellows Hall (George, 1979, p. 441).40 This act of terrorism by white supremacists targeted the most significant center of leisure and entertainment in the local Black community, much like the car a joyful space of relative autonomy, where dances were held on Saturday nights (Castillo, 2000, p. 84; Fields, 1974, p. 11).
- 41 Ibid., 2.
- 42 “Race Difficulty Smoothed Out,” 1-2.
48The bombing of Off Fellows Hall directly precipitated a meeting between representatives of white churches of Miami and the Colored Board of Trade as well as the local sheriff, chief of police, mayor, and two city council members. Most attendees of the 1917 meeting agreed that “Negroes are to be fully protected in their right to drive their own cars” as well as the right to hire Black car and truck drivers, drive busses with (exclusively) Black patrons, and chauffeur Black passengers. Most agreed, additionally, that Black motorists should have “police protection” of their right to drive in Miami.41 Exactly how these measures were to be enforced in a prevailing culture of white supremacy remained open, however. The same article reported, “Members of the white committee [‘representing the white churches of Miami’] admitted the absence of law for making discrimination between white and negro drivers, but urged that Miami has been built up as a ‘white man’s town’ and the unwritten law has been that only white men should drive automobiles.”42
49Members of the CBT “agreed to use every influence in their power to induce colored car drivers not to do anything to irritate the white chauffeurs unnecessarily,” and that Black chauffeurs would always return “at once” to Colored Town after chauffeuring a client to any other part of Miami.43 This anecdote speaks to both the terrorizing white supremacist status quo in Miami at the time and the successful insistence of members of local Black communities that the space of the car was a desirable, deeply significant site of both work and pleasure.
50Much as elsewhere in the country, laws stipulating racial segregation in the practice of driving were never put into effect in Miami as such (Bay, 2021, p. 111). White supremacists in the Jim Crow era instead used such diffuse tactics as vigilante terror and police surveillance of Black drivers, the revocation or non-issuance of driver’s licenses, and racial discrimination in the issuance of mandatory public liability insurance, also known as redlining (Taylor, 2020, p. 40-42; Adair, 2017; Franz, 2004, p. 143-144). Gretchen Sorin writes of indirect means of inhibiting leisure in automobiles for Black Americans: “Like the Confederate national anthem, the name of the Dixie Highway [which ran from Florida to near Canada] both humiliated and frightened black people” (Sorin, 2020, p. 92).
- 44 “Miami Stops Citizens from Meddling Negro Chauffeurs,” Dallas Express, Dec. 6, 1919, 1.
51Driving a car while Black in Miami in the late 1910s was a precarious endeavor despite agreements on the part of white Miamians to support Black automotivity. News reports of the era indicated that white chauffeurs continued to terrorize Black drivers, leading to renewed vows to protect Black motorists’ rights. An article by the Associated Negro Press (ANP) in December 1919 stated, after more than eight years of conflict, “Interference with Negro chauffeurs or any other law-abiding persons was unanimously condemned by the Chamber of Commerce membership meeting.”44 Intimidation had been used “both toward the white tourists and the drivers” of cars recently driven in Miami by Black chauffeurs.
- 45 “Intimidation of Negro Chauffeurs Must Stop, Demand the Business Men […] Intimidation is Driving Pe (...)
- 46 “Negro Board of Trade Deplores Carelessness of Colored Chauffeurs,” Miami Herald, June 18, 1919, 2.
52The apparent interest of white members of the Miami Chamber of Commerce in Black chauffeurs’ right to drive was likely directly connected to white chauffeurs’ demands for higher wages and their protests of Black chauffeurs’ right to work in the late summer and fall of 1919 (Castillo, 2004, p. 465-467). Members of the Miami Chamber of Commerce had themselves supported a ban on Black automotivity prior to World War I. Calls to protect the rights of Black motorists emphasized the perspective that a potential decrease in tourism due to white supremacist violence was bad for Miami economically. A headline in the Miami Daily Metropolis the same year read, “Intimidation of Negro Chauffeurs Must Stop, Demand the Business Men […] Intimidation is Driving People to Other Cities.”45 Adhering to a similar logic of paternalism, the Board of Directors of the CBT published an op-ed in the Miami Herald in 1919 insisting that all Black chauffeurs meet with the Board the same day.46
- 47 There were more than 175,000 residents of Miami and more than 25,000 cars in the city by 1925 (Geor (...)
53By the early 1920s, many Black residents of Miami owned their own cars as well as their own homes. Black chauffeurs made up a third of Miami’s chauffeurs and Black residents a third of the city’s population in 1920 (Castillo, 2000, p. 97). There were at least 10,000 cars in the city by the same year (George, 1977, p. 8).47 Black drivers (including carriage drivers, teamsters, and draymen) represented forty-four percent of all Miami-based drivers recorded in the 1920 census (Castillo, 2000, p. 98). One can infer that many Black motorists drove in Miami at the time. These numbers are particularly significant when put into comparative perspective; Black chauffeurs represented approximately 13 percent of more than 285,000 chauffeurs employed across the United States in 1920 (Castillo, 2000, p. 73; Borg, 2007, p. 29).
54The respite from humiliation on public transportation and from what N. D. B. Connolly terms “the wider colonial experience of apartheid in southern Florida” is palpable in the significant representation of Black drivers in Miami in the 1920 census (Connolly, 2014, p. 24). Early-twentieth-century Miami exposes ways in which Black motorists insisted on their right to chauffeur local residents and tourists as well as to simply enjoy driving. They conjured a world in the physical and affective space of the car that both served as an important site of labor and facilitated leisure. Leisure for Black motorists represented a radical break from the past and relief from terrorizing aspects of the present.
55As the examples of Madam C. J. Walker in Jamaica, the joyriding chauffeurs in Fort Worth, Texas and the 1917 advocacy of members of Miami’s Colored Board of Trade indicate, work and leisure in cars in the first several decades of the automotive century often went hand in hand. I have argued that early Black chauffeurs in Miami claimed pleasurable space and its attendant leisure via driving in a profoundly racist, frequently terrorizing touristic climate. The important role of the material space of the car in the early history of Miami is evidenced in the difference between the initially non-segregated status of what became Miami Beach and the virulent opposition to early Black automotivity on the part of Miami’s white chauffeurs. Whether by refusing physical removal from their cars or by participating in the pursuit of joy in driving, early Black drivers used automobiles to escape terror and claim pleasurable, lucrative space.
56This article exposes ways in which white chauffeurs, homeowners, employers, local authorities, and police officers worked together to undermine Black chauffeurs’ access to work and leisure in cars in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These actors’ efforts to prohibit Black automotivity in Miami were more virulent than in almost any other part of the contemporary United States. By 1920, however, Black motorists and businesspeople in Miami had insisted on their right to drive. While additional studies of driving for Black motorists in Miami in the 1920s and beyond are necessary, this article’s significant contributions to existing historiography lie in its analysis of the capacity of the car to facilitate more desirable experiences of subjectivity in even the most restrictive settings. In spite of local white chauffeurs’ efforts and thanks in part to the profound economic interests of local businesspeople in continued tourism to the city, early Black motorists in Miami forged significant access to work and pleasure in the consumerist space of the car. Black automotivity in Miami disrupted aspects of the city’s system of racial capitalism and established the car as a site of refusal, work, and pleasure.