![]() ![]() While much has changed since the civil rights movement fought for better protections for Black Americans, car-based transportation - now the dominant mode of American travel - continues to drive racial discrimination and inequality today. “Black drivers took many precautions to protect themselves and their families from these dangers,” Sorin explains. Black drivers “encountered racist law-enforcement officers and gas-station attendants, bigoted auto-repairmen, threatening road signs,” and sundown towns: communities where Black people were expected to vacate by nightfall, under threat of violence. Those new freedoms brought new perils, though. “This freedom meant something different - and often, simply more - to Blacks than to whites,” Sorin writes. In Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, historian and professor Gretchen Sorin writes about the ways cars opened new possibilities for freedom of movement to Black Americans, offering refuge from the segregation that defined mass transit in the Jim Crow South. “I’ve never in my life had a speeding ticket.” What was particularly nerve-wracking for her was her sense that it didn’t matter how carefully she drove: Her trouble with the law began not because she’d driven dangerously, but because of expired license plates. “I’m African American.” The knowledge that, as a Black driver, she was more likely to be pulled over contributed to her sense of unease. I always got nervous if I saw an officer, or if I passed one by and wasn’t sure if they’d get behind me,” she says. “I cannot even tell you my emotional trauma. Moseley-Sayles had to keep using her car and hope that she wasn’t pulled over and arrested for it. In the interim, she faced a conundrum that millions who have suspended licenses must contend with each year: Taking away a license doesn’t take away a person’s need to drive. It took Moseley-Sayles nearly a decade - by which time she’d paid off her initial ticket plus an additional $5,000 in warrant fees and other fines - to get her license reinstated. As of 2021, about 11 million Americans had their driver’s licenses suspended due to nonpayment of fines and fees. ![]() You can read the entire discrimination package here. Our collaboration launched with a comprehensive look at Juneteenth as it became the nation’s newest federal holiday. The growing movement for reparations in health care.Since 2022, Vox has partnered with the Black-led nonprofit newsroom Capital B to publish inclusive, rigorous journalism for our audiences. Moseley-Sayles had to call a friend to pick up her kids while she waited to be released from jail later that night. She tried to stay on top of payments, but in 2014, the worst happened: She was dropping her kids off at school and an officer pulled her over and informed her that she had an outstanding warrant for unpaid fees and was under arrest. In 2011, she was pulled over again and informed that because she hadn’t paid her fines, her license had been suspended. The late fees accumulated and then multiplied. She didn’t have the money to pay, so Moseley-Sayles was stuck, unable to afford the fine necessary to get back on the original payment plan. In order to get out of warrant status, she’d have to pay the warrant fees, which in Nevada can be $150 or more. She wasn’t sure what missing a payment would mean, but when Moseley-Sayles called the court to ask if she could resume payments the next month, she learned that because she’d missed one, there was now a warrant out for her arrest. She signed up for a payment plan, not anticipating how that traffic ticket would haunt her for the next several years of her life.įor the first few months, she made her payments on time. So when the officer issued a ticket for $299 because her California license plate had expired, it couldn’t have come at a worse time: Moseley-Sayles didn’t have the money to pay. She was getting a divorce and going through a custody battle, raising four young children, and working on a political campaign. When a Nevada police officer pulled over Leisa Moseley-Sayles in 2010, she was new to Las Vegas. This story was produced in partnership with Capital B. Part of the discrimination issue of The Highlight. ![]()
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