Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr and other terrible comics like to claim that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” is a hoax and that, owing to the fact of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, America is a “post-racial” country. Freedom is the law of the land! Go anywhere. Do anything.
Imagine for a moment, however, that you’re a 33-year-old African-American long-haul trucker from Anniston, Alabama, in 1947. You haven’t slept in two days, you’re tired of sleeping under your truck on a cold, damp tarpaulin for fear of being lynched after Sundown, and you’re just about to pull in to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Racial segregation is the law. You could be harassed, arrested or killed. Or that you’re a 26-year-old African-American single mother of two kids, eight and six. You need a safe place for you and them to crash in 1954 in Lizard Lick, North Carolina. You’d like to see a kind face behind the counter in the motel office and be served a hot breakfast the next morning--just like anyone else. Or that you’re Bob Gibson, star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. It’s 1964. Your team was the first in baseball to end team segregation, but when you travel with your team you still can’t sleep and eat in the same hotels with your white teammates in several cities. Then there’s all of Florida during Spring Training. Imagine that you are a family of five African-Americans in 1966 and that you’re about to embark on your first family road-trip vacation from Atlanta, Georgia to Little Rock, Arkansas. You’ve “heard stories.” You’ll pack coffee tins, blankets, pillows and tinned foods in ways whites won’t.
Enter The Negro Motorist’s Green-Book (known also by other names). The Green Book was assembled and published first in 1936 by a brilliant U.S. Postal Service worker, Mr. Victor Hugo Green. His Green Book, published annually for three decades, guided would-be African-American road-trippers along relatively safer routes. The Green Book highlighted friendly hotels and taverns, churches and night-clubs, beauty parlors and barber shops, and rest areas, road-houses and car repair shops. The Green Book expanded to include all 50 states, Oregon, too. The Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King even mentioned these painful issues in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol on August 28 of 1963: “We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.”
Or maybe it’s the Fall of 2023. You’re African-American. You live in Dayton, Ohio. You’re trying to visit family in Florida. A travel advisory for peoples of color was announced because of what the governor there and his supporters have done to erase your history. It’s not necessarily safe for you to travel. Is there still a Green Book for you?
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