Travel comes in different sizes, shapes and colors (Feb 2023)

By Guy Trammell Jr.

In the 1960s my brother, distributing SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) voting materials with Stokley Carmichael, learned fast driving skills to avoid arrest by prejudiced Southern law enforcement on back roads. He and I took road trips in my college years. Travel meals included White Castle burgers, McDonald’s fries, A&W root beer. Once, when traveling through Kentucky’s mountain roads we passed a few eateries, and he called out, “This is the one!” It was a “Mom and Pop” gas station, grocery and a few other things. We ordered burgers “with the kitchen sink” and my oh my! That was an amazing gastronomic experience.

Sammy L. Younge, Jr., Tuskegee’s Civil Rights icon, attended prep school in Massachusetts. He and a few other boys from Tuskegee traveled there by train. Sammy’s light complexion allowed him to “pass” as a white boy, so until reaching the Mason Dixon Line at Virginia he wandered throughout the train, undisturbed. The Black porter kept watch over him. Sammy mixed in with white students, and brought food and drink to his friends in the rear train car. They were nervous, but he saw it as a game of breaking unjust rules.

Jessie Abbott, wife of Tuskegee’s legendary athletic director Cleve Abbott, helped manage the Tigerettes, Tuskegee Institute’s women’s track team. Tuskegee had the first ever female track program at any U.S. educational institution. The Tigerettes won first place trophies on a regular basis. They even trained by running against men’s teams.

Jim Crow complicated their track meet travel plans. In the East, Tuskegee alumni living along travel routes provided lodging in their homes. However, California track meets were challenging. Travel to Grambling State University in Louisiana and the next day to Prairie View A&M University in Texas was fine. Then a two-day-plus, non-stop drive with side-of-the-road bathroom stops, to avoid “sundown towns” (Black man be out of town, before the sun goes down). For a change from sandwiches, Mrs. Abbott provided a “hot meal” by placing cans of beans on the engine.

In college I traveled five days via bus, on a meager budget, to study on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. And no, I didn’t heat beans on the bus manifold! But in San Antonio I experienced my first burrito stand. At 50 cents, I ordered two, with a 75-cent quart of OJ from the grocery, and enjoyed the large handcrafted delicacies, viewing Southwestern landscapes.

Safe, enjoyable travels to you!


By Amy Miller

For a tiny chunk of time that now seems to many of us like maybe it never happened, we stopped traveling. Everyone stopped, everywhere on Earth. In 2020, air travel, car traffic, border crossing and passport applications all took a dive as the pandemic swept across the globe.

Now we are back in the saddle, moving about as much as ever. Americans traveled by car over 3 trillion miles in the year that ended in March 2022. That was the most ever in a 12-month period, according to the Department of Transportation.

In 2021, 145 million people or about a third of our population in the US had valid passports, according to federal figures. These passports give US citizens the ability to travel easily – sans visas – to 186 countries. Residents of a dozen or so nations do us better, with Japan topping the list as its citizens can go visa-free to 193 countries.

Americans take 2.3 billion trips within this country each year and 93 million trips abroad, the majority of these to Europe and just over our border to Mexico.

Why do some of us, myself included, like traveling so much? Why are we so eager to leave home for distant lands? Philosophy abounds on the value of traveling – “traveling,” which is about exploring, versus “vacationing,” which is about rest and relaxation.

Most of the travel philosophy speaks of the draw of the unknown and the foreign, of new experiences and ideas.

In the 17th Century, Rene Descartes wrote “It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly and not think that everything contrary to our own ways is ridiculous and irrational…”

Not everyone needs to travel to expand their consciousness. There are a hundred and one other ways to do that. But those who cross cultural borders, whether in or out of their own country, whether from Maine to Tuskegee or America to Argentina, come back with a new view on difference.

As a child, I thought life without electricity existed in history, or in far outposts of Africa. Now I have been to more than one place, on more than one continent – neither of them Africa –  where people live without power lines. These fellow human beings eat, read, laugh, and raise their children. They live in a different world, but it is still our world.