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The Negro Motorist Green Book
The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers, commonly referred to simply as the Green Book.
It was originated and published by 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 non-whites was widespread. 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. 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. 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."
Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes.
African-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".
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." 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 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 have been republished in facsimile, and have sold well.
Traveling while black: the African-American travel experience
 [^]  Before the legislative accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, black travelers in the United States faced major problems unknown
to most whites. White supremacists had long sought to restrict black mobility, and were uniformly hostile to black strangers. As a result,
simple auto journeys for black people were fraught with difficulty and potential danger. They were subjected to racial profiling
by police departments, 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.
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: 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 blacks arranged large group excursions for as many as 2000 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. SCOTUS ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that
"separate, but equal" accommodations were constitutional, but in practice, facilities for blacks 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 "colored sections". In 1917, the 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 enough 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.
As 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 blacks throughout the United States "were not at all sure how to behave
or how whites would behave toward them", as Bart Landry puts it. 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: not one hotel or other accommodation was open
to blacks in Salt Lake City in the 1920s. Black travelers were stranded if they had to stop there overnight. Only six percent of the more
than 100 motels that lined U.S. Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, admitted black customers. Across the whole state of New Hampshire,
only three motels in 1956 served African Americans. 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 A. Cayton reported that "the city's hotel managers, by general agreement, do not sanction the use of hotel facilities by Negroes,
particularly sleeping accommodations." One incident reported by Drake and Cayton illustrated the discriminatory treatment meted out even
to blacks 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 B. Granger of the National Urban League puts it, "so far as travel is concerned, Negroes are America's last pioneers."
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 that 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 has 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 at least 10,000 sundown towns across the U.S. – including large suburbs such as Glendale, California ;
Levittown, New York ; and Warren, Michigan. 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".
Even in towns which did not exclude overnight stays by blacks, 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.
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 that "after riding all day, I'd say to myself,
'Wouldn't it be nice if we could spend the night in one of those hotels?' or, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could stop for a real meal
and a cup of coffee?' We'd see the little white children jumping into motel swimming pools, and you all would be in the back seat of a hot car,
sweating and fighting." African-American travelers faced real physical risks, because of the widely differing rules of segregation that existed
from place to place, and the possibility of extrajudicial violence against them.
Activities that were accepted in one place could provoke violence a few miles down the road. Transgressing formal or unwritten racial codes,
even inadvertently, could put travelers in considerable danger. Even driving etiquette was affected by racism; in the Mississippi Delta region,
local custom prohibited blacks from overtaking whites, to prevent their raising dust from the unpaved roads to cover white-owned cars.
A pattern emerged of whites purposefully damaging black-owned cars to put their owners "in their place". Stopping anywhere that was not known
to be safe, even to allow children in a car to relieve themselves, presented a risk; Milloy noted that his parents would urge him and his brother
to control their need to use a bathroom until they could find a safe place to stop, as "those backroads were simply too dangerous for parents
to stop to let their little black children pee". Racist local laws, discriminatory social codes, segregated commercial facilities, racial profiling
by police, and sundown towns made road journeys a minefield of constant uncertainty and risk. Road trip narratives by blacks reflected their unease
and the dangers they faced, presenting a more complex outlook from those written by whites extolling the joys of the road.
Milloy recalls the menacing environment that he encountered during his childhood, in which he learned of "so many black travelers.
just not making it to their destinations." Even foreign black dignitaries were not immune
to the discrimination that African-American travelers routinely encountered. In one high-profile incident, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah,
the finance minister of newly independent Ghana, was refused service at a Howard Johnson's restaurant at Dover, Delaware, while traveling
to Washington, D.C., even after identifying himself by his state position to the restaurant staff. The snub caused an international incident,
to which an embarrassed President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by inviting Gbedemah to breakfast at the White House. Repeated
and sometimes violent incidents of discrimination directed against black African diplomats, particularly on U.S. Route 40 between New York
and Washington, D.C. led to the administration of President John F.
Kennedy setting up a Special Protocol Service Section within the State Department to assist black diplomats traveling
and living within the United States. The State Department considered issuing copies of The Negro Motorist Green Book to black diplomats,
but eventually decided against steering them to black-friendly public accommodations as it wanted them
"to have all of the privileges of whiteness." John A. Williams wrote in his 1965 book, This Is My Country Too, that he did not believe
"white travelers have any idea of how much nerve and courage it requires for a Negro to drive coast to coast in America." He achieved it with
"nerve, courage, and a great deal of luck," supplemented by "a rifle and shotgun, a road atlas, and Travelguide, a listing of places in America
where Negroes can stay without being embarrassed, insulted, or worse." He noted that black drivers needed to be particularly cautious in the South,
where they were advised to wear a chauffeur's cap or have one visible on the front seat and pretend they were delivering a car for a white person.
Along the way, he had to endure a stream of "insults of clerks, bellboys, attendants, cops, and strangers in passing cars."
There was a constant need to keep his mind on the danger he faced; as he was well aware, "[black] people have a way of disappearing on the road."
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