Last week I introduced The Green Book. Published by Mr. Vincent Hugo Green, an African-American U.S. Postal Service worker in New York, in 1936, it ran until 1966. The Green Book helped African-Americans travel slightly more safely during the era of Jim Crow laws. African-Americans bought and drove their own cars partly to get away from segregated cars, buses, ferries, trains and aeroplanes. Kathleen Franz, in “African-Americans Take to the Open Road,” quotes George Schuyler 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."
Systemic racism caused the need for The Green Book, but The Jewish Vacation Guide, first published around 1916, was its direct progenitor. It provided contact details for Jewish-owned or Jewish-friendly locales and businesses across the U.S. “No Hebrews or Consumptives Accepted” was not infrequently stated on U.S. hotel and motel registers and advertisements.
In "Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880–1950” (2005), Myra B. Young Armstead quotes the black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois extensively. In 1917 he observed that "ever-recurring race discrimination" had made it virtually impossible for African-Americans to travel to work, to recreate, and to migrate from the sharecropping farms and ranches of the American South to the factories and service industries of the Industrial North during The Great Migration. Mass-produced cars potentially liberated black Americans from "Jim Crow cars" (uncomfortable railroad carriages). A black magazine writer commented in 1933 that, in one’s own car, "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" (Mark S. Foster, 1999).
Cars were necessary but insufficient for African-Americans. No blacks were offered lodgings in Salt Lake City in the 1920s. Almost all such were closed to blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio until the 1960s. Only a very few motels lining U.S. Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, admitted them. New Hampshire offered only three motels to African-Americans in 1956.
Enter The Green Book. Published annually, each staple-bound green softpaper-wrapped issue offered both general advice (plan ahead, be prepared, report adverse events) but also up-to-date data useful to Black travelers, state-by-state, city-by-city. Jet and Ebony followed soon in its wake with similar advice that enabled a “travel and leisure” culture to emerge from within the Black Experience.
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