Driving across Woodward Avenue in Detroit a few weeks ago amid a spirited George Floyd demonstration — this one a 30-mile motorcade into the suburbs, billed as the “I Have a Dream Protest Cruise” — my mind drifted strangely to an empty two-lane highway in Arkansas near the Texas border. The memory was jarring, sweeping me away from this raucous caravan — honking horns, Black-power fists thrust from car windows, the whir of sirens — back to my youth in the spring of 1986.
Twenty-two years old, fresh out of college and cruising into one of the prettiest sunsets I’d ever seen, I was nearing the end of my 1,200-mile journey from Detroit to a summer reporting gig in Dallas. Somewhere outside Texarkana, Ark., the sun perched on the nose of my Honda Accord and guided me for miles like some mystical hood ornament. The moment was exhilarating. Enveloped in the dusky light, the narrow highway rushing toward me, Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” cranked high, I felt a new kind of freedom, the sort I’d only witnessed in those white boy coming-of-age films like “The Graduate.”
That is, until I heard the shrill siren of a patrol car, and saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I cut off my music, and pulled to the side of the highway. A white patrolman, hands on his holster, moved toward my vehicle. The flat endless horizon and dusky light took on a surreal aura. I was petrified. When the patrolman asked for my license and registration, and where I was going, I channeled my elders. I kept my hands visible and was performatively polite, even reverential.
This routine always fills me with self-contempt, but here, on this lonely highway, it seemed to be working. The policeman disappeared into his patrol car, and left me waiting and waiting. Eventually, he returned and without a word, handed me my I.D. and walked off. I sat there for a few moments, shaken. I lived. But a part of me died that day.
Few relationships in America are as complex as the Black man and his automobile. As a native Detroiter, my affection for cars — from the intricacy of their machinery to their potent mythology — is hard-wired into my psyche.
Both of my grandfathers worked in auto factories: Oldsmobiles on my mother’s side, and Buicks on my dad’s. Their labor would pave our way into the middle-class, or at least in aspiration. Family vacations were road trips; movies were drive-ins, Saturday pastimes were me and my buddies sitting on the curb gazing dreamily at passing cars, claiming the coolest, most decked out Corvettes, Mustangs, Trans-Ams and Cadillacs as our own.
By the time we were teenagers, our creed was simple: Your ride pretty much defined you and where you were going in life. Your car was your currency — in work, leisure and yes, romance. On dates, Smokey Robinson, Motown’s suave balladeer, told our truth: “You’re gonna fly away, glad you’re goin’ my way, I love it when we’re cruising together.”
But when you’re Black in America you also, paradoxically, learn to distrust, fear even, that lovely machine preening in your driveway. You learn the hard way the perils of hitting the road — that those beckoning back streets, city boulevards and wide-open highways are not always routes of thrilling adventure and escape, as advertised, but rather places where Black people all too often die, or greatly suffer at the hands of racist whites.
It’s our cars, hyped up in such American values as freedom, mobility and adventure, that reveal the falsity of these ideals, even in the basic routines of daily life. Think of Philando Castile in Minneapolis, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C. — just a few among the generations of Black men who were fatally gunned down by the police during traffic stops.
The gangster-like brutality of so many American police officers, one hopes, is finally turning on itself. That Sunday afternoon in Detroit, the stream of cars, from convertible coupes, to pickup trucks to minivans, snaking along Woodward Avenue to protest George Floyd’s death, seemed infinite. On both sides of the street, pedestrians and shop owners stood cheering, some with fists held high and others waving placards — “Black Lives Matter,” “No Justice, No Peace,” “I Can’t Breathe” — as we began our journey from downtown Detroit north into Oakland County, its whiter, wealthier neighbor.
On the road
A few days earlier, I had left Columbia, Mo., where I live and teach journalism at the University of Missouri, to drive to my hometown. My trips across the so-called “Show-Me State” are always tense: A few years ago, the N.A.A.C.P. issued a travel advisory on Missouri as unsafe for people of color, an advisory that has yet to be lifted. As Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., put it when initiating the advisory: “The numerous racist incidents, and the statistics cited by the Missouri Attorney General in the advisory, namely the fact that African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than Caucasians, are unconscionable, and are simply unacceptable in a progressive society.”
The University of Missouri is also my college alma mater, and so my experiences traveling the state’s roads go deep. Back in the mid-1980s, I remember heading back to Columbia from St. Louis with four buddies, all of us African-American, after a spring break. Packed merrily into my friends’ beater, an old Ford Pinto, we headed into Jennings, a mostly Black North St. Louis County community heavily patrolled by white officers, to pick up one more college friend.
The moment we pulled off the ramp, I got a bad feeling. Like its neighboring community of Ferguson (some three decades later, local police would fatally shoot 18-year-old Michael Brown there), Jennings had a reputation for police meeting quotas by ticketing and arresting Blacks.
Moments later, a siren sounded and there we were, leaning spread-eagle against my buddy’s car as a couple of white policemen frisked us for weapons and drugs. They ran my friend’s license plates and searched his car. Apparently, he had several unpaid parking tickets. The police cuffed him, put him in the squad car and told the rest of us that we were free to leave. Of course, we had no ride now; a friend’s sister dropped us off at the downtown Greyhound station. We got back to Columbia so late that I slept through an early morning exam.
Now, in 2020, behind the wheel of a late model Dodge Ram truck, I drove across the flat rural plains of central Missouri, flanked by acres of farmland stretching infinitely into the distance and the occasional sight of cattle grazing under hazy morning skies.
My vehicle suited the setting. It’s a curious thing: After years of sporting sedans, I bought the pickup about a year ago partly for the extra cargo space, but also to avoid drawing the attention of Missouri police. In a region where pickup trucks are status quo, the Ram, I suppose, is my rather sad attempt at vehicular camouflage. Perhaps it’s a coincidence (and I’m sure I’ll regret thinking this), but I haven’t yet had any run-ins with the law in my truck; only lots of locals pulling up beside me at stop lights to offer the “wow-there’s-a-Black-man-in-a-pickup” thumbs up.
Heading east on I-70, with the St. Louis’s Gateway Arch looming over the Mississippi River, I settled in as the skies brightened. I crossed the state line into Illinois, and around noon, I pulled off at a gas station to fill my tank. I had packed plenty of food and drinks to minimize going into public spaces and contracting the coronavirus. But there was no way to minimize the tedium of sanitation on road trips: the masks, the wiping of hands and handles and knobs as I got in and out of the car. Walking through the gas station toward the restroom, I noted that less than half the patrons wore masks.
Minutes later, I was back on the highway, sailing past a blur of farms, fast-food restaurants and truck stops. I once lived in Illinois, in Chicago, and as I drove along the interstate, the thought of stopping for a meal, perhaps looking up some old friends, occurred to me. But I was wary about lingering. According to a 2019 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, Black and Latino drivers in Illinois were more likely to be asked to be searched by police, even though they were less likely to be found with contraband during consent searches than white drivers. In recent years, Chicago police have more than tripled their traffic stops, with Black drivers accounting for the majority of this increase.
So, the decision was simple: I was making good time on my trip to Detroit, and I kept driving.
This kind of calculus is, perhaps, unique to Black drivers in America. Yet here’s the sad irony: Historically, our cars were viewed as our best refuge against white violence and aggression while traveling. After Emancipation, all the way through the 1950s and ’60s, we relied largely on public transportation, whether it was buses, trolleys or trains, and coupled with verbal and physical harassment, suffered the indignities of separate, inferior service.
The mass production of the automobile was a game-changer for African Americans. As the prominent economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, whose studies on the American racial divide led to a Nobel Prize, wrote in 1944: “The cheap automobile has meant for Southern Negroes, who can afford one, a partial emancipation from Jim Crowism.”
Still, I remember a colleague telling a story of heading north from the Carolinas for family vacations. His father, an army veteran, would wear his uniform in the sweltering summer heat for the entire drive, hoping his patriotic service would prevent police harassment.
But service to your country didn’t matter most of the time: Back in 1946, Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr, a 26-year-old, decorated World War II veteran hopped on a Greyhound bus, hours after being honorably discharged from military service. In South Carolina, he somehow wound up in an argument with another passenger and the cops showed up, accused him of public drunkenness, and beat him so bad that he was permanently blinded. The case, fraught with racial hated, was said to have been a catalyst behind Harry S. Truman’s drive to integrate the U.S. military.
In those days, Victor Hugo Green, a postal-worker-turned-travel-writer, was viewed as a kind of savior. His self-published “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book” provided an exhaustive review of stores, motels and gas stations that offered services to Blacks, greatly easing our mobility and avoiding white violence. There were other such guides, such as “Hackley and Harrison’s Hotel & Apartment Guide for Colored Travelers” and “Grayson’s Guide: The Go Guide to Pleasant Motoring,” but the “Green Book” was considered the Bible for Black travelers.
Despite his book’s popularity, Green hoped that better times would one day put him out of business. “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” he wrote. “That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”
Detroit, in a sobering light
Some 10 hours later, I arrived in the Detroit area and spent the evening with my father in the northern suburbs. I awoke early and headed into the city, noting from the freeway impoverished neighborhoods — boarded storefronts, abandoned houses, lots full of weeds — that looked unchanged since my childhood.
It all cast a more sobering light on the city than headlines I’d read in recent years, which mostly trumpet Detroit’s “comeback” after bankruptcy in 2013. To be sure, the glitzy entertainment venues downtown and block after block of trendy new restaurants and bars have added a cosmopolitan sheen. Still, it’s hard to celebrate amenities aimed at white suburbanites and hipsters when Detroit’s neighborhoods and schools (mostly Black) are largely crumbling.
As I pulled into the gentrifying Cass Corridor area, where protesters’ cars were lining up for the motorcade, I witnessed, block by block, the juxtaposition of poverty and new development that has only stoked long-simmering racial distrust.
In truth, I had not planned to spend much time in Detroit, but rather holed up in the woods three hours north, restoring our family cottage in Idlewild, Mich., a historic African-American resort. But there was no escaping the rage around George Floyd’s murder. Nearly everyone I knew was protesting somewhere in the country. That furor landed me in the middle of the caravan of vehicles on Woodward Avenue.
While there were protests across the city that weekend, this one was, by comparison, decidedly middle-aged, Motor City-styled and, given our cars, as pandemic-proof as possible. It was the brainchild of my childhood friend J.D. Simpson, who felt a pang of guilt for letting Covid-19 get in the way of supporting his 18-year-old daughter and her friends who were leading demonstrations elsewhere.
Honking their horns from the safety of their cars, thousands of men and women, Black and white, inched their way north, until we exited Detroit’s city limits and moved deep into the whiter suburbs of leafy, manicured Oakland County. Now that we were here, the mood of the protest shifted — there were fewer supporters and spectators cheering us on, fewer police escorts moving alongside. The crowds had been reduced to mostly gawkers — with an occasional hipster fist pump.
In the gridlock, I marveled at all the beautiful automobiles surrounding me, all the miles behind and ahead of us. On my radio I heard the swelling bass line of Marvin Gaye’s protest classic “Inner City Blues” and turned it up loud, letting his ache, now a half-century old, pump out into the suburban air: “Yeah, it makes me wanna holler and throw up both my hands, Crime is increasing, trigger happy policing, panic is spreading, God knows where we’re heading.”
Cruising into affluent Bloomfield Hills, I noticed a white man, perhaps in his 70s, standing at the wrought-iron entrance. Our eyes locked. His fist went up. I honked my horn.
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