Riding Jane Crow

African American Women on the American Railroad

Railroads occupy a celebrated place in American culture and history. So where are the accounts of Black women’s experiences with this form of technology? Within Riding Jane Crow is a counter-archive of American railroad history: the overlooked stories and strategies of Black women passengers and workers navigating life on and around the train between 1860 and 1925.

Here we meet the entrepreneurial “waiter carriers” of Virginia, who “engaged in commerce and economic enterprise.” “Why,” Thaggert asks, is the Pullman maid rarely mentioned when Pullman porters or African American railroad history are discussed? From Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells, Thaggert recounts “the unique dilemmas of Black female middle-class trayel.”

In recovering this history, Thaggert broadens, enriches and complicates the familiar story Americans tell about ingenuity and “progress.”