October 1, 2025

Dark travel: exhuming the racialised transit gaps beneath twentieth-century travel maps

Key Points

The article reveals that typical interstate highway maps excluded safe travel routes for African American travellers, emphasizing the lack of representational cartography.
Racialised transport gaps became effectively hidden within the narratives of American freedom, as evidenced by historical references to the Jim Crow era and the Green Book.
Examining the absence of representational maps, the research underscores how policymakers and urban planners escaped culpability for a racially biased infrastructure.
The analysis draws comparisons with redlining maps that document housing discrimination, pointing out the omission of cartographic evidence for transportation disparities.

Abstract

During the Jim Crow era and its aftermath, the routes depicted on typical interstate highway maps took on an alternative meaning for African American travellers. Unlike the Green Book, an essential travel glossary for Black travellers in 1930s–1960s USA, maps systematically ignored one crucial layer: where Black people could safely or legally drive, sleep or fill up with petrol. The network of roads designed to represent an infrastructure of ‘American freedom’ became effective dead ends for Black travellers. In this article (and accompanying collage series using original 1958 ESSO road maps), I argue that the invisibility of racialised transportation routes on government and commercial travel maps allowed American policymakers, urban planners and transportation engineers to escape culpability for their participation in financing an inherently racist world-building project. Victor H. Green’s Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–66) is an essential primary source to dispute this. However, the Negro Motorist Green Book was only optionally accompanied by maps (often provided by ‘benevolent’ corporate partners, like the ESSO petrol company) and these failed to visualise the safe travel routes and racialised infrastructure gaps that the business listings in the Green Book itself exposed. Representational cartography is one of the most potent tools for fomenting a common understanding of cultural and economic histories. Unlike the visual archive of housing discrimination provided by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s ‘redlining’ maps, historians and geographers lack similar cartographic proof that transportation infrastructure equally circumscribed African Americans’ social and physical mobility. This article illustrates how a lack of representational maps have allowed the USA to cement these stratified networks into its landscapes for nearly a century thus far.

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