Abstract: This essay examines the travel writing of three emblematic Black American women in 1930s Europe: Flaurience Sengstacke, Roberta G. Thomas, and Fay McKeene Hershaw. I am particularly engaged with their travel writing in the Chicago Defender newspaper about fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. All three women depended on American Express Travelers Cheques and reported that the cheques enabled them to travel freely and without racial discrimination. Building on the work of Laura Visser-Maessen, Jorrit van den Berk, Maria I. Diedrich, Michelle M. Wright, and others, this essay highlights how financial infrastructure, such as American Express, and communication infrastructure, such as the Chicago Defender and related publishers, presented opportunities for freedom and mobility for wealthy Black Americans. At the same time, these capitalist infrastructures obscured from many Black writers, editors, and perhaps even readers the reality of mounting racism in 1930s Europe.
Grace Dutt (Sun,) studied this question.