Good Roads and Anti-Black Violence

Darius Scott

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 3, 567-580

Abstract: Following Progressive-era advocacy (1890–1930), a modernized road work site emerged in the U.S. South designed to be populated by mobile fleets of Black imprisoned laborers. The forced road work dislodged U.S. roads from their localized production and maintenance so they could assume an expert-led, technological form—physically and discursively. On the road, however, labor was merely a means of violently reifying hierarchical racial differences, making the “good road” a monument to the modern persistence of state-enacted anti-Blackness. This article assesses the emergence of this regional, racial system of anti-Black violence alongside the undertheorized spatial situation of the imprisoned laborers themselves by consulting the report of Bayard Rustin following time spent on a Roxboro, North Carolina, prison road work camp. The report recounts his own experiences along with those of other men, as well as their songs. The laborers’ firsthand accounts foreground persistent desires for loves, families, and homes beyond the racial capitalist traumas undergirding U.S. transportation geographies.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2022.2124145 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:113:y:2023:i:3:p:567-580

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2124145

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().