I'm having a little bit of trouble researching this topic. The novel I'm writing has a scene where our main character, who is black, is supposed to fly from a fictional city to Chicago in 1968. He is portrayed as an average middle class African-American boy. Is it unrealistic for him to be flying? And how far, in advance, could one purchase a ticket for a flight in 1968? Thanks in advance.
In the sixties air travel wasn’t quite as popular as today; travel by air was much more expensive than by rail or bus; travel by bus cost $2.73 rail $0.71 and air $34.13 (Unadjusted for inflation). With the average salary of all Americans in 1965 being $6,900 and Nonwhite Americans being $3,971, when the opportunities for travel arose, traveling by air wasn’t much of an economic option. Not to say that Blacks didn’t at all it just wasn’t all that common. Yet when the opportunity to fly arose from what I can tell the airlines themselves didn’t assign seating based on race yet Blacks still faced discrimination at the airports. Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan in a letter to Robert F. Six, President of Continental Airlines noted that at some airports in the south there were white’s only waiting rooms, restrooms, restaurants. Taxi Cabs and limousines would only patron white costumers. Yet he noted that in “Chattanoga(sic) I experienced the strange paradox of permitting Negros to eat in the same restaurant without restrictions, but prohibiting them from using the same toilet facilities as white people.” While the airlines didn’t segregate seating, they did however discriminate on hiring pilots and crew, these jobs were restricted to whites till 1963 when Marlon Green won a lawsuit against the above mentioned Continental Airlines.
*edit: Formatting.
To piggyback on this question, I know there was a booklet that helped African Americans on road trips, were there any suggestions in that booklet about air travel?
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Thanks!