In production from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, the book offered a road map for African Americans navigating roads across the country, showing where black drivers and their families could eat, find lodgings, and enjoy themselves without concerns of experiencing racism or humiliation.
The guide has seen a resurgence in attention of late, especially after the release of the controversial Oscar-winning Green Book— a dramatized biopic focused on black musician Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga, his Italian-American chauffeur and bodyguard — travels through the Deep South during a music tour in the early 1960s.
A new documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, looks at how the historic travel guide helped black motorists.
In the 1930s, as the spread of automobiles spurred American drivers to take long trips to explore the country, black drivers who took to America’s roads regularly experienced discrimination during their travels.
But in 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a black postal worker, created a guide that would allow African Americans to embrace the adventure and road trips enjoyed by their white counterparts. The result was The Negro Motorist Green Book, the most popular guide for black travelers for three decades.
In production from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, the book offered a road map for African Americans navigating roads across the country, showing where black drivers and their families could eat, find lodgings, and enjoy themselves without concerns of experiencing racism or humiliation.
The guide has seen a resurgence in attention of late, especially after the release of the controversial Oscar-winning Green Book— a dramatized biopic focused on black musician Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga, his Italian-American chauffeur and bodyguard — travels through the Deep South during a music tour in the early 1960s.
But Victor Green’s guide has a much richer history than the one depicted in the film, which only briefly mentions the Green Book, and centers a white character in a film named after a guide aimed at helping black motorists. In their heyday, Green Books were used not only to help black drivers find safety and avoid humiliation but also to find entertainment and vacation spots. Activists used the Green Book as part of their work, regularly using black hotels and businesses as meeting spots.
And the books, which advertised locations in every state in the US, were relevant for African Americans across the country, not just in the Deep South. More than a tool for navigating Jim Crow, Green Books also enabled black travelers to navigate less formal systems of discrimination in the North and West, where black people still were often not allowed access to the same spaces as whites.
“It was much harder to navigate in the North and the West because you didn’t have the signs,” says filmmaker Yoruba Richen, whose new documentary The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, premieres on the Smithsonian Channel on February 25. “You didn’t know what places were dangerous and what places you weren’t supposed to go into.”
I spoke with Richen about the history of the Green Book, how the book was used to build community among African Americans during a time of formal and informal segregation, and why the Green Book’s existence refutes the idea that racism was only a Southern problem.
P R LockHart
No comments:
Post a Comment