The Movement

For African Americans, the post-World War II mood of victory was short-lived, with soldiers and civilians inhabiting a nation segregated by law and by practice in both the North and the South. 

For some, the American West offered a respite or the American dream realized, seizing on a pioneer spirit championed by the likes of filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who had made films and advocated for homesteading since the 1910s, and ended his cinematic career in Harlem. 

The freedoms denied daily led almost directly to any number of Black motorcycle clubs started after the war. Established by returning veterans and enthusiasts who often worked as mechanics or in the automotive pool, these Black-centered clubs across the country offered camaraderie, familiar (and familial) structure, and the feeling of freedom on the road—not to mention the protection group travel offered. Figures like Gertrude Hadley Jeanette—the first woman of any race to get a taxicab license in 1941, or to get a motorcycle license soon after—paved their own paths. 

Starting in the 1940s, club members traded their service patches for ones they designed themselves. The extensive archive of one Wade Redd, whose vest adorns the wall, not only reveals this connection to the armed forces--where he served as an automotive equipment operator in an aviation regiment--but also the change the motoclubs provided from his prewar position of chauffeur. Later, Black soldiers such as Matthews Maxie Jr., seen here, had Black Power street styles made in Korea in the 1970s while stationed along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Journalist Wallace Terry reported from Vietnam on the mood and movements of Black soldiers. Their travel wasn’t always voluntary, but Black soldiers crafted lives abroad as well as back home. 

This change in ideas of transport and freedom led directly to the modern Civil Rights Movement, which began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and continued with the bus rides of Freedom Summer in 1961, weathering the white violence directed at civil rights workers trying to help the U.S. realize its promises of equality. Rarely seen surveys of Black travelers on Montgomery bus lines, conducted by former Schomburg curator and Martin Luther King Jr. biographer L.D. Reddick, depict the daily struggle up close. The choice to travel on one’s own terms, whether by motorcycle, automobile, bus, or airplane, remained an act of defiance.