Logistics
Consider travel in 1924 for white and Black students. What would it be like to travel to another state, without airplanes, without highways, and without detailed geographic maps? What would it have been like to travel some hundreds of miles on a train--and what would it have been like if it was a segregated train? In a word, travel to the 1924 conference was difficult--particularly so for the Black students suffering under segregation.
The experience would have been different for each group. Students from ten institutions (including Swarthmore itself) traveled anywhere between seven miles to five hundred miles and under different circumstances. Attendees from the South spoke about the Jim Crow cars and segregation that they had experienced on their way to the event. The map below displays the institutions whose students attended the 1924 conference and the distance between the institutions and the destination of Swarthmore. The map aims to illustrate the vast space that some students traveled in order to arrive at the conversation and to offer details on potential routes. Routes and accommodations are based on a rudimentary knowledge of train stations, rail lines, and hotels that are thought to have existed at the time. Therefore, the map is largely a hypothetical work. For more detail about travel and accommodations a century ago, please view the Maps & Travel exhibit.
Instructions
The map opens to a view of Swarthmore. In order to toggle between the layers of the map (see below), select the menu icon at the upper left corner of the map. Each layer can be toggled on and off.
- The first layer, “Travel in 1924,” represents an example of a route that students traveling from that institution might have taken. Because knowledge of contemporary roads, train stations, and train lines is limited and the scope of this project is narrow, only one route is represented in detail.
- To identify the ten institutions, the map also displays their first initial in the “1924 Participating Institutions” layer, and a demarcation of their campuses (borders based on modern campus maps) in the “1924 Institution Campuses” layer. These details are added in order to emphasize the real, tangible places that participants came from.
- All other distances aside from the complex route are represented as direct “as the crow flies” routes, under the “1924 Direct Routes” layer. To observe the exact distance and a list of students who made that journey, select the route from the menu, or select the route directly from the map. The width of each direct route signifies the number of students who attended from that institution.
- Finally, the map includes a collection of Philadelphia hotels listed in Hackley & Harrison's hotel and apartment guide for colored travelers, a guide to businesses where travelers of color were welcome.