Professor Mia Bay has won this year's Bancroft Prize for her recent book discussing travel segregation in the United States.
Bay’s book, "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance," tells the history of how discrimination in transportation conflicted with Black Americans’ fight for civil rights. Mae Ngai, a professor at Columbia University, also received the award.
The Bancroft Prize, established in 1948, is awarded annually to two books in the subject areas of American history or diplomacy.
Bay is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at Penn and studies American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history. As a recipient of the Bancroft Prize, she will receive a stipend of $10,000.
The book has received critical acclaim for showing the marginalization of Black people in the U.S.
A New York Times book review acknowledged Bay’s book for detailing Black resilience by using the literal example of the Black community's migration as a frame to explain the civil rights movement.
The Bancroft jury described the book as “a major intervention in our understanding of the civil rights movement and the everyday life of racial domination” and applauded the book’s extensive and creative research using various primary and secondary sources.
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