Riding Jane Crow

Miriam Thaggert is an associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance.

"Riding Jane Crow brilliantly explores the experiences of Black women as passengers and workers on trains in post-Reconstruction America. This meticulously researched and well-written book takes the reader on a powerful journey that unveils the intricacies of race, gender, and class in travel history."--Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller 400 Souls and award-winning author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom "Over the long twentieth century, black women navigated the gendered, sexualized, racialized hierarchies of American railroads, producing something new in American cultural history, a counter-story of Black female railroad history. With meticulous and creative archival research, Thaggert tells the story of Black female fugitive slaves, Black Pullman maids, Black female food vendors, and elite Black women travelers, who challenged the violence and humiliations of race and gendered train spaces and even, in some instances, secured their constitutional right to freedom and mobility."--Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s