The Negro Motorist Green Book

9/20/2016 8:19:33 PM Link 0 comments | Add comment

The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African American Roadtrippers. The Green Book originated and was published by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green in the United States from 1936 to 1966. He also founded a travel agency.

The Green Book listed hotels, boarding houses, restuarants, beauty shops, barber shops and various other services for African Americans during the era of Jim Crow laws.

During the Jim Crow era many Blacks took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation and to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult.

African-American travelers faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences, such as white-owned businesses refusing to serve them or repair their vehicles, being refused accommodation or food by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only "sundown towns". Green founded and published The Negro Motorist Green Book to tackle such problems, compiling resources "to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable."

From a New York-focused first edition published in 1936, Green expanded the work to cover much of North America, including most of the United States and parts of Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. The Green Book became "the bible of black travel during Jim Crow",^[3] enabling black travelers to find lodgings, businesses, and gas stations that would serve them along the road. It was little known outside the African-American community. Shortly after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the types of racial discrimination that had made the Green Book necessary, publication ceased and it fell into obscurity.

Today, Federal historians are using Green Books as guides to research locales across the nation as part of an effort to better understand the African American experience, and build a national park system that better reflects the diversity of America’s history, people and culture.