When we think of civil rights and public transportation, the image that comes to mind is probably that of Rosa Parks refusing her bus seat to a white passenger, and the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott. However, as Hilary McLaughlin-Stonham demonstrates in From Slavery to Civil Rights: On the Streetcars of New Orleans, 1830s–Present, battles for integration on city transportation are vast in both geographic and chronological scope. McLaughlin-Stonham's book chronicles the fight for equality in New Orleans through the “theatre” of the streetcars, marking an important intervention in the scholarship.

The book proves a chronological survey of streetcar segregation in Louisiana's most populous city. This is an ambitious project with a wide scope, but the author succeeds in arguing for the importance of streetcars in the building of Jim Crow and segregation as well as in their eventual downfall. The book examines the origins of segregation laws and scrutinizes the extent to which they were implemented either de jure or de facto and does this through the lens of the streetcar. McLaughlin-Stonham uses census data, legislative journals, letters, court transcripts, and local newspapers to argue the importance of New Orleans streetcars in the wider movement for civil rights.

The introduction opens by discussing the importance of New Orleans and Louisiana in general in the study of black protest and resistance: the city was the “urban centre of the longest continuously running streetcar system in the world” (1). The book's investigation into New Orleans history is critical for civil rights scholarship because despite vast research into the Deep South, study of New Orleans is limited in the field. Furthermore, McLaughlin-Stonham states that Louisiana's civilian laws were based on Spanish and Napoleonic codes from the early nineteenth century, which sets it apart from other Deep South states (23), establishing the case for Louisiana as an enigma within the Deep South.

The ensuing chapters argue that despite legal advances for black people in New Orleans after the Civil War, the road to streetcar desegregation was not a linear story of progress. Prior to the establishment of Jim Crow, blacks and whites lived alongside each other in a city that was always racially diverse, but the end of Reconstruction allowed Jim Crow to “creep in” and sustain itself for over fifty years (53). The book asserts that New Orleans is a crucial case study largely because it did not resemble the major southern cities around it. Moreover, the book illustrates that laws surrounding streetcars were different from those on railway lines due to standardized fares. Although the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case originated in Louisiana, it did not decide racial segregation on streetcars, making it a grey area for Jim Crow legislation. Therefore arbitrary racial legislation was often implemented to make these divisions more concrete, and this is one of the book's most important interventions: race as a social construct, a construct which caused the New Orleans government to pass insubstantial segregation legislation. Black passengers recognized this because they protested such laws almost immediately after they were passed.

The book also challenges the notion that major court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education impacted the everyday lives of African Americans, and, moreover, that New Orleanians were always present in the streetcars in big numbers, which was not always the case in other “theatres” for segregation protest, such as public schools and swimming pools (159). Here, McLaughlin-Stonham illustrates the limits of civil rights legislation and the importance of grassroots protest. They also make a strong connection between the New Orleans streetcar protests and the bus boycotts of the classical phase of the civil rights movement, especially the 1958 Baton Rouge boycott, reaffirming the importance of streetcar protests.

The book's epilogue describes the decline of streetcars as automobiles became more common and affordable; streetcars have become more of a tourist attraction in New Orleans than a means of transportation, with lines running through affluent areas due to gentrification following Hurricane Katrina (201). McLaughlin-Stonham also argues that despite streetcar integration in 1958, the struggle for equality is not over; the city remains largely segregated, much like many American cities. Overall, From Slavery to Civil Rights illustrates the complexity of segregation legislation in New Orleans and gives agency to the black residents that resisted Jim Crow. The book successfully situates streetcars within the wider history of the fight for civil rights.