Traveling Black by Mia Bay

Author:Mia Bay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

SEGREGATING SEATING

During World War II, the travel needs of military personnel—Black or white—took priority over those of all other passengers. In these years the airlines also began to experiment with various forms of seat segregation that either confined Black passengers to certain seats, or made sure they all shared the same row. How common such practices were is difficult to determine, given that Black passengers were not numerous and the airlines made no public commitment to segregated seating. But in 1945 the Chicago and Southern Airline (one of Delta’s precursors) admitted that it practiced Jim Crow seating on its Dixie-bound flights.

“It is true that Negro passengers are requested to assume the forward seats on the airplane,” an official for the airline wrote to Theodore Allen, a Black federal government employee who protested when one of the airline’s stewardesses made him reseat himself in the front of the plane, after he and the white man with whom he was traveling had taken seats in the middle of the plane. The airline’s representative was unapologetic about the practice and suggested that “from the standard of personal comfort, these [forward seats] are the most desirable seats in the aircraft. Thus it should be made clear that the practice rather than one of discrimination is one of offering Negro accommodations and facilities which are equal or superior to those offered other passengers.”59

Langston Hughes was familiar with the Jim Crow forward seats, and actually agreed with this positive assessment. A well-known poet and playwright, who described himself as “half writer and half vagabond,” Hughes was an early and enthusiastic advocate of air travel.60 In a 1946 Chicago Defender column celebrating the advantages of “Planes vs Trains,” he wondered why “everybody does not travel by plane.” Faster and cleaner than trains, planes held additional advantages for “colored travelers in the South.” “As yet, there are no Jim Crow planes,” he also noted, before qualifying this claim by saying that he had heard that “colored travelers in Dixie are sometimes given the No. 1 seat,” and admitting that “once in Oklahoma I was most courteously assigned to the No. 1 seat.” But he had no objections to this seat assignment, as he was convinced that the No. 1 was “really the best seat, being at the front with lots of leg room and a wonderful view unobstructed by the wing.”61

Not all travelers shared Hughes’s enthusiasm for the No. 1 seat. Commercial airlines in the 1940s typically used propliners, or propeller-driven planes, which were powered by propellers located in the front of the plane. These planes varied somewhat by model, but their front seats tended to be noisy. First-class seating on propliners, if available, was invariably located in the rear, which was not only quieter, but easier to enter and exit—given that these planes were entered through doors located on the tail of the plane. Far from being universally regarded as the best seat on the plane, the propliners’ No. 1 seats may have struck many as the worst.

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