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The Streetcar Wars: Streetcars, Segregation and Social Change

The most widely used form of urban public transportation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, streetcars were also a major site or racial conflict. Desegregated in the Post-Civil War era—largely as a result of Black protests—they were resegregated in the South during the twentieth century’s first decade and remained a stage for race riots and other clashes between Blacks and whites throughout their history.  This paper will explore the intertwined rise of street cars and racial segregation in making of modern American cities.

Dr. Mia Bay is the newly appointed Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History in the University of Cambridge. Previously she taught at University of Pennsylvania, where she was Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and in the Department of History at Rutgers University, where she also led the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance ( Harvard University Press, 2021). Her previous books include To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Hill & Wang, February 2009); The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000). Bay’s current scholarly projects include a book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson, and a study the streetcars and segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States.