The Green Book’s Black History
Lessons from the Jim Crow-era travel guide for African-American elites.
By Brent Staples
Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.
•
Jan. 25, 2019
20:08Traveling
While Black
The Green Book was a critical guide for African-Americans struggling to travel safely in the Jim Crow
era. This 360 degree video explores its complicated legacy.CreditCreditRoger Ross Williams
[The New York Times and Oculus are presenting our 300th Op-Doc, the virtual-reality film “Traveling While
Black,” related to this Opinion essay. To view it, you can watch on the Oculus platform or watch the 360
degree video above.]
Read this essay, first published in January, on the history of the Green Book. The Best Picture Oscar
was awarded to the “Green Book” feature film.
Imagine trudging into a hotel with your family at midnight — after a long, grueling drive — and being
turned away by a clerk who “loses” your reservation when he sees your black face.
This was a common hazard for members of the African-American elite in 1932, the year Dr. B. Price
Hurst of Washington, D.C., was shut out of New York City’s Prince George Hotel despite having
confirmed his reservation by telegraph.
Hurst would have planned his trip differently had he been headed to the South, where “whites
only” signs were ubiquitous and well-to-do black travelers lodged in homes owned by others in the
black elite. Hurst was a member of Washington’s “Colored Four Hundred” — as the capital’s black
upper crust once was known — and was familiar with having to plan his life around hotels, restaurants
and theaters in the city, and throughout the Jim Crow South, that screened out people of color.
Hurst expected better of New York City. He did not let the matter rest after the Prince George turned
his travel-weary family into the streets. He wrote an anguished letter to Walter White, then executive
secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., explaining how he had been rejected by four hotels before shifting
his search to the black district of Harlem. He then sued the Prince George for violating New York
State’s civil rights laws, winning a settlement that put the city’s hotels on notice that discrimination
could carry a financial cost.
African-Americans who embraced automobile travel to escape filthy, “colored-only” train cars learned
quickly that the geography of Jim Crow was far more extensive than they had imagined. The motels
and rest stops that deprived them of places to sleep were just the beginning.
While driving, these families were often forced to relieve themselves in roadside ditches because the
filling stations that sold them gas barred them from using “whites only” bathrooms.
A sign at a bus station in Jackson, Miss.CreditWilliam Lovelace/Express/Getty Images
White motorists who drove clunkers deliberately damaged expensive cars driven by black people — to
put Negroes “in their places.”
“Sundown Towns” across the country banned African-Americans from the streets after dark, a
constant reminder that the reach of white supremacy was vast indeed.
As still happens today, police officers who pulled over motorists of color for “driving while black”
raised the threat that black passengers would be arrested, battered or even killed during the
encounter.
The Negro Traveler’s Bible
The Hurst case was a cause célèbre in 1936 when a Harlem residentand postal worker named Victor
Hugo Green began soliciting material for a national travel guide that would steer black motorists
around the humiliations of the not-so-open road and point them to businesses that were more than
happy to accept colored dollars. As the historian Gretchen Sullivan Sorin writes in her revelatory
study of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the guide became “the bible of every Negro highway
traveler in the 1950s and early 1960s.”
The Green Book, circa 1948.CreditThe New York Public Library
Green, who died in 1960, is experiencing a renaissance thanks to heightened interest from
filmmakers: The 2018 feature film “Green Book” won three Golden Globes earlier this month, and the
documentary “Driving While Black” is scheduled for broadcast by PBS next year.
Then there is The New York Times opinion section’s Op-Doc film “Traveling While Black,” which
debuts this Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. The brief film offers a revealing view of the Green
Book era as told through Ben’s Chili Bowl, a black-owned restaurant in Washington, and reminds us
that the humiliations heaped upon African-Americans during that time period extended well beyond
the one Hurst suffered in New York City.
Sandra Butler-Truesdale, born in the capital in the 1930s, references an often-forgotten trauma — and
one of the conceptual underpinnings of the Jim Crow era — when she recalls that Negroes who
shopped in major stores were not allowed to try on clothing before they bought it. Store owners at the
time offered a variety of racist rationales, including that Negroes were insufficiently clean. At bottom,
the practice reflected the irrational belief that anything coming in contact with African-American skin
— including clothing, silverware or bed linens — was contaminated by blackness, rendering it unfit for
use by whites.
This had deadly implications in places where emergency medical services were assigned on the basis
of race. Of all the afflictions devised in the Jim Crow era, medical racism was the most lethal. AfricanAmerican accident victims could easily be left to die because no “black” ambulance was available.
Black patients taken to segregated hospitals, where they sometimes languished in basementsor even
boiler rooms, suffered inferior treatment.
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In a particularly telling case in 1931, the light-skinned father of Mr. White, the N.A.A.C.P. leader, was
struck by a car and mistakenly admitted to the beautifully equipped “white” wing of Grady Memorial
Hospital in Atlanta. When relatives who were recognizably black came looking for him, hospital
employees dragged the victim from the examination table to the decrepit Negro ward across the
street, where he later died.
That same year, Juliette Derricotte, the celebrated African-American educator and dean of women at
Fisk University, succumbed to injuries suffered in a car accident near Dalton, Ga., after a white
hospital refused her treatment.
Advertising to the Black Elite
Victor Hugo Green remains a mysterious figure about whom we know very little. He rarely spoke
directly to Green Book readers, instead publishing testimonial letters in what the historian Cotten
Seilerdescribes as an act of promotional “ventriloquism.” The debut edition did not exhort black
travelers to boycotts or include demands for equal rights. Instead, Green represented the guide as a
benign compilation of “facts and information connected with motoring, which the Negro Motorist can
use and depend upon.”
Image
The Green Book presented a compilation of “facts and information connected with motoring, which
the Negro Motorist can use and depend upon.”
CreditThe New York Public Library
The coolly reasoned language put white readers at ease and allowed the Green Book to attract
generous corporate and government sponsorship. Green nevertheless practiced the African-American
art of coded communication, addressing black readers in messages that went over white peoples’
heads. Consider the passage: “Today, our thousands of travelers, if they be thoughtful enough to arm
themselves with a Green Book, may free themselves of a lot of worry and inconvenience as they plan a
trip.”
White readers viewed this as a common-sense statement about vacation planning. For AfricanAmericans who read in black newspapers about the fates that befell people like Ms. Derricotte, the
notion of “arming” oneself with the guide referred to taking precautions against racism on the road.
A photo of Green Book creator Victor H. Green from the 1961 edition.
The Green Book was subversive in another way as well. It promoted an image of African-Americans
that white Americans rarely saw — and that Hollywood deliberately avoided in films for fear of
offending racist Southerners. The guide’s signature image, shown on the cover of the 1948 edition —
and used as stationery logo for Victor Green, Inc. — consisted of a smiling, well-dressed couple
striding toward their car carrying expensive suitcases.
Green believed exposing white Americans to the black elite might persuade white business owners
that black consumer spending was significant enough to make racial discrimination imprudent. Like
the black elite itself, he subscribed to the view that affluent travelers of color could change white
minds about racism simply by venturing to places where black people had been unseen. As it turned
out, black travelers had a democratizing effect on the country.
Like many African-American institutions that thrived during the age of extreme segregation, the
Green Book faded in influence as racial barriers began to fall. It ceased publication not long after
the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in public
accommodations. Nevertheless, the guide’s three decades of listings offer an important vantage point
on black business ownership and travel mobility in the age of Jim Crow.
In other words, the Green Book has a lot more to say about the time when it was the Negro traveler’s
bible.
Related
“Traveling While Black” is part of Op-Docs’s 8th annual series of films from the Sundance Film
Festival. Watch more from the 2019 series.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Brent Staples joined the Times editorial board in 1990 after working as an editor of the Book Review and an
assistant editor for metropolitan news. Mr. Staples holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of
Chicago. @BrentNYT
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 28, 2019, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the
headline: The Black History of the ‘Green Book’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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