DRIVING WHILE BLACK:

How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life—the true history beyond the Best Picture–winning movie.

A tie-in to an upcoming PBS documentary co-written with Ric Burns, DRIVING WHILE BLACK chronicles The Negro Motorist's Green Book, a road travel guide for black Americans during the era of official segregation in hotels and restaurants, and explores the deep, indelible racism embedded in the national fiber, the universal American love of the automobile and the open road and the importance of free, self-directed mobility to a people whose history is marked by enslavement and controlled movement to this day.

Written with passion and scholarship, and filled with rare photographs and eye-opening first-hand accounts connected with a memoir-like thread of personal narrative, DRIVING WHILE BLACK will be an notable contribution to a deeper understanding of the African-American experience in all its complex realities from the black perspective.

Gretchen Sullivan Sorin is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She holds a BA degree from Rutgers University in American Studies, an MA in Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, and a PhD from Albany University in history. Dr. Sorin has more than thirty years of experience as a museum consultant working for more than 250 museums. She has served as an exhibition guest curator for many exhibitions including the nationally acclaimed traveling exhibition, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews for the Jewish Museum in New York and Wilderness Cure: Tuberculosis and the Adirondacks for the Adirondack Museum. Dr. Sorin writes and lectures frequently on African American history and museum practice. Her books include Touring Historic Harlem, Four Walks in Northern Manhattan with architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art and Case Studies in Cultural Entrepreneurship: How to Create Relevant and Sustainable Institutions. She is currently working with Ric Burns and Steeplechase Films on a documentary film on African Americans and the automobile and travel during the era of Jim Crow.