The Negro Motorist Green Book (also, The Negro Travelers' Green Book, or Green-Book) was a guidebook for African American roadtrippers. It was founded by Victor Hugo Green, an African American postal worker from New York City, and was published annually from 1936 to 1966. This was during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. While 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. In the South, where Black motorists risked harassment or physical violence, these dangers were particularly severe. In some cases, African American travelers who got lost or sought lodging off the beaten path were killed, with little to no investigation by local authorities. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African Americans. Eventually, he also founded a travel agency.
Many black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. 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".Franz, p. 242. Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes using automobiles that they owned personally.
African American travelers faced discrimination, 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 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". 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".
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", 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 the 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. 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.
Four issues (1940, 1947, 1954, and 1963) have been republished in facsimile () and have sold well. Twenty-three additional issues have now been digitized by the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
African American travel experiences
Before the legislative accomplishments of the civil rights movement, car journeys for black people were fraught with difficulty and potential danger. They were subjected to racial profiling by police departments ("driving while black") and sometimes seen as "uppity" or "too prosperous" just for the act of driving, which many whites regarded as a white prerogative. They risked harassment or worse on and off the highway.Seiler, p. 88. A bitter commentary published in a 1947 issue of the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, highlighted the uphill struggle black people faced in recreational travel:
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. Such restrictions dated back to colonial times and were found throughout the United States. 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. They could plan leisure travel for the first time. Well-to-do black people arranged large group excursions for as many as 2,000 people at a time, for instance traveling by rail from New Orleans to resorts along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In the pre-Jim Crow era, this necessarily meant mingling with whites in hotels, transportation, and leisure facilities. They were aided in this by the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had made it illegal to discriminate against African Americans in public accommodations and public transportation.
They encountered a white backlash, particularly in the South, where by 1877 white Democrats controlled every state government. The Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1883, resulting in states and cities passing numerous segregation laws. White governments in the South required even interstate railroads to enforce their segregation laws, despite national legislation requiring equal treatment of passengers. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional, but in practice, facilities for black people were far from equal, generally being of lesser quality and underfunded. Blacks faced restrictions and exclusion throughout the United States: if not barred entirely from facilities, they could use them only at different times from whites or in (usually inferior) "colored sections".
In 1917, black writer W. E. B. Du Bois observed that the impact of "ever-recurring race discrimination" had made it so difficult to travel to any number of destinations, from popular resorts to major cities, that it was now "a puzzling query as to what to do with vacations". It was a problem that came to affect an increasing number of black people in the first decades of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of southern African-Americans migrated from farms in the south to factories and domestic service in the north. No longer confined to living at a subsistence level, many gained disposable income and time to engage in leisure travel.
The development of affordable mass-produced automobiles liberated black Americans from having to rely on the "Jim Crow cars"—smoky, battered, and uncomfortable railroad carriages which were the separate but decidedly unequal alternatives to more salubrious whites-only carriages. One black magazine writer commented in 1933, in an automobile, "it's mighty good to be the skipper for a change, and pilot our craft whither and where we will. We feel like Vikings. What if our craft is blunt of nose and limited of power and our sea is macademized; it's good for the spirit to just give the old railroad Jim Crow the laugh."
Middle-class black people throughout the United States "were not at all sure how to behave or how whites would behave toward them", as Bart Landry puts it.Landry, p. 58. In Cincinnati, the African American newspaper editor Wendell Dabney wrote of the situation in the 1920s that "hotels, restaurants, eating and drinking places, almost universally are closed to all people in whom the least tincture of colored blood can be detected". Areas without significant black populations outside the South often refused to accommodate them: black travelers to Salt Lake City in the 1920s were stranded without a hotel if they had to stop there overnight. Only six percent of the more than 100 motels that lined U.S. Route 66 in Albuquerque, admitted black customers. Across the whole state of New Hampshire, only three motels in 1956 served African-Americans.Rugh, p. 77.
George Schuyler reported in 1943, "Many colored families have motored all across the United States without being able to secure overnight accommodations at a single tourist camp or hotel." He suggested that black Americans would find it easier to travel abroad than in their own country. In Chicago in 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton reported that "the city's hotel managers, by general agreement, do not sanction the use of hotel facilities by Negroes, particularly sleeping accommodations".Drake & Cayton, p. 107. One incident reported by Drake and Cayton illustrated the discriminatory treatment meted out even to black people within racially mixed groups:
Coping with discrimination on the road
While automobiles made it much easier for black Americans to be independently mobile, the difficulties they faced in traveling were such that, as Lester Granger of the National Urban League put it, "so far as travel is concerned, Negroes are America's last pioneers".Seiler, p. 87. Black travelers often had to carry buckets or portable toilets in the trunks of their cars because they were usually barred from bathrooms and rest areas in service stations and roadside stops. Travel essentials such as gasoline were difficult to purchase because of discrimination at gas stations.
To avoid such problems on long trips, African Americans often packed meals and carried containers of gasoline in their cars. Writing of the road trips he made as a boy in the 1950s, Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post recalled that his mother spent the evening before the trip frying chicken and boiling eggs so that his family would have something to eat along the way the next day.
One black motorist observed in the early 1940s that while black travelers felt free in the mornings, by the early afternoon a "small cloud" had appeared. By the late afternoon, "it casts a shadow of apprehension on our hearts and sours us a little. 'Where', it asks us, 'will you stay tonight?'" They often had to spend hours in the evening trying to find somewhere to stay, sometimes resorting to sleeping in haylofts or in their own cars if they could not find anywhere. One alternative, if it was available, was to arrange in advance to sleep at the homes of black friends in towns or cities along their route. However, this meant detours and an abandonment of the spontaneity that for many was a key attraction of motoring.
The civil rights leader John Lewis recalled how his family prepared for a trip in 1951:
Finding accommodation was one of the greatest challenges faced by black travelers. Not only did many hotels, motels, and boarding houses refuse to serve black customers, but thousands of towns across the United States declared themselves "sundown towns", which all non-whites had to leave by sunset. Huge numbers of towns across the country were effectively off-limits to African Americans. By the end of the 1960s, there were an estimated 10,000 sundown towns across the United States—including large suburbs such as Glendale, California (population 60,000 at the time); Levittown, New York (80,000); and Warren, Michigan (180,000). Over half the incorporated communities in Illinois were sundown towns. The unofficial slogan of Anna, Illinois, which had violently expelled its African American population in 1909, was "Ain't No Niggers Allowed".Loewen, pp. 15–16.
Even in towns which did not exclude overnight stays by black people, accommodations were often very limited. African Americans migrating to California to find work in the early 1940s often found themselves camping by the roadside overnight for lack of any hotel accommodation along the way.Flamming, p. 166. They were acutely aware of the discriminatory treatment that they received. Courtland Milloy's mother, who took him and his brother on road trips when they were children, recalled: