"Driving while Black" in 1963

I just finished a book by black author John A. Williams entitled This is My Country Too.   It was written in 1963, the year President Kennedy was assassinated.  Williams, the author of the 1967 best seller The Man Who Cried I Am, was assigned by Holiday Magazine to travel around the U.S. and report back.  He put 15,000 miles on the car, traveling to the South, California, the Northwest and Southwest.  He was pulled over by cops for what we call today a DWB offense, was refused service, had to sleep in black-owned motels in the South, but also had some white friends he looked up along the way, and he visited some great jazz clubs.

He mentions getting sick a few times, and no wonder.  It was not easy being a lone black man driving across the U.S. in 1963.  It still is not easy, but you probably won’t get turned down when you stop at a hotel.

In an “Afterword” Williams wrote that the trip had been a real trial.  “I had had to reach the conclusion that man as I knew him best in America, was not basically good as is always suggested but evil in the primitive possessive, and destructive sense.  I knew good people existed; I had been fortunate in meeting many of them.  But stack American upon American, reach into the heap and pull one out and the chances of getting hold of one who measured up to the ideal American we all would like to be would be practically nil.”

Williams died in 2015.  I wonder if he had the same attitude when he died.  I think today he would.