Mellon Forum February 13 - Allyson Hobbs

Date
Feb 13, 2017, 12:00 pm12:00 pm
Location
School of Architecture, South Gallery

Details

Event Description

Far from Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of American History in the Department of History at Stanford University

Discussant: Stacey Sinclair, Psychology, Princeton University

Hobbs is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), which won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. She is a contributing staff writer for New Yorker.com, a TEDx talk participant and appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, and National Public Radio.  Her work has been featured on cnn.com, slate.com and in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Her next book, Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that African American motorists experienced on the road.  Jim Crow laws and local customs put mid-century American pleasures—taking to the road, exploring the country, enjoying the freedom and the autonomy of driving one’s own car—out of the reach of black drivers.  This book is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in the fall of 2019.