#Greenbooks. free

After the end of legal slavery in the North and later in the South after the Civil War, most freedmen continued to live at little more than a subsistence level, but a minority of African-Americans gained a measure of prosperity. Such restrictions dated back to colonial times, and were found throughout the United States. Thousands of communities in the US had enacted Jim Crow laws that existed after 1890 in such sundown towns, African-Americans were in danger if they stayed past sunset. Would a Negro like to pursue a little happiness at a theater, a beach, pool, hotel, restaurant, on a train, plane, or ship, a golf course, summer or winter resort? Would he like to stop overnight at a tourist camp while he motors about his native land 'Seeing America First'? Well, just let him try! A bitter commentary published in a 1947 issue of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine, The Crisis, highlighted the uphill struggle blacks faced in recreational travel:

They risked harassment or worse on and off the highway. They were subjected to racial profiling by police departments (' driving while black'), sometimes seen as 'uppity' or 'too prosperous' just for the act of driving, which many whites regarded as a white prerogative. White supremacists had long sought to restrict black mobility, and were uniformly hostile to black strangers.Īs a result, simple auto journeys for black people were fraught with difficulty and potential danger. īefore the legislative accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, black travelers in the United States faced major problems unknown to most whites. Twenty-three additional issues have now been digitized by the New York Public Library Digital Collections. There has been a revived interest in it in the early 21st century in connection with studies of black travel during the Jim Crow era.įour issues (1940, 1947, 1954, and 1963) have been republished in facsimile (as of December 2017), and have sold well. 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. It was little known outside the African-American community. The Green Book became 'the bible of black travel during Jim Crow', enabling black travelers to find lodgings, businesses, and gas stations that would serve them along the road. įrom 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 maker of a 2019 documentary film about the book offered this summary: 'Everyone I was interviewing talked about the community that the Green Book created: a kind of parallel universe that was created by the book and this kind of secret road map that the Green Book outlined'. Green founded and published the Green Book to avoid 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'. Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes using automobiles that they owned personally.Īfrican-American travelers faced hardships 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'.

#Greenbooks. free

As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, 'all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult'.

Many black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African-Americans, eventually expanding its coverage from the New York area to much of North America, as well as founding a travel agency. Although pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African-American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could, but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. It was originated and published by African-American New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. The Negro Motorist Green Book (also The Negro Motorist Green-Book, The Negro Travelers' Green Book, or simply the Green Book) was an annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers.