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The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the "black travel guide to America." At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and 'Overground Railroad' celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.… (mer)
A wealth of information about traveling in the United States during the Jim Crow era and the challenges that African Americans faced when they traveled as chronicled by The Green Book. As a youngster I remembered seeing the Green Book someplace during my travels. My father took our family on many trips and the one thing that I remember is that we did not see many people of African American descent on our travels. I did not understand the challenges that they were facing. This book provides a snap shot of those times and illustrates the problem that people of color face today while traveling.
I really enjoyed reading this book, especially for some of the stories that were in it and the fact that it showed the challenges that black travelers faced. I personally think that the book could have used a good final editing; however, it does not decrease the value as a historical document. ( )
This is not just about road tripping while black. It’s an examination of our country’s approach to civil liberties and the rampant racist highways that have been paved through our political systems and subconscious.
Every reader will learn something new here, it might be one or two things for some or it might be a new fact every few minutes for others, how exciting!
There are things we don't know, but can learn. Just as there are things we can learn, but never really know. This book travels a familiar road unrecognizable to many of us. Fascinating, heart-breaking, disturbing and hopeful. Not an academic volume, but full of revelation. ( )
I thought I knew the story of the Green Book, but from the beginning I knew I did not know that much. It never occurred to me why Blacks in the 1930’and 1940’s chose to drive at night. Nor did I know how the automobile industry helped Blacks find work. Taylor’s trip across America to find the ruminates of what was presented in the Green book was heartbreaking in the discovery than less than 5% of the businesses are still in operation. I listened to the audiobook, which was good, but because of the accompanying photographs and drawings, I would prefer this book in print. I do not even recommend Kindle. ( )
WOW! The power of sharing personal true stories rings through time and time again with Taylor’s tribute to the Green Book and those Black individuals, couples, and families who traveled the “Overground Railroad” - powerful primary source documents and photographs are juxtaposed amid poignant prose.
“I don’t care if you’re the pope or the president...You have to eat. And I can cook for you...If I can get the people on both sides [of the political spectrum] to just sit down at my table, I think we can work this out.” Leah Chase, owner & chef, Dookey Chase’s, New Orleans, Louisiana
My next read in relation to this book will be Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which has been on my TBR list. ( )
Taylor creates a vivid, multi-voiced travelogue, drawing on interviews, archival documents and newspaper accounts. Historic photographs provide context. Her contemporary images drawn from her travels — landscapes of boarded-up or graffiti-laced wastelands, empty vistas where sites once stood — also play a dynamic, before-and-after role in storytelling.
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For Ron, Mom, Aimee, Adger, Sophie, and Chris
Inledande ord
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Introduction: "Don't you dare say a word."
Chapter One: As Ron hurried down the plush carpeted stairs on his way to the garage, carrying a stack of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Howlin' Wolf CDs, he said, "Okay. I'm ready to roll!" I stared at him and shook my head. "It's after ten o'clock. Why can't you drive during the day, like a normal person?" His answer was always the same. "Traffic."
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After scouting more than 3,600 Green Book sites, I realized that most of my well-meaning liberal friends in the coastal cities had never seen the poverty that millions of Americans are living in. By the time I got to Detroit, after leaving Los Angeles and driving across the country, I was in tears.
The sites that are still with us symbolize survival: They endured the times the pendulum swung forward and a wrecking ball swung back. These businesses survived urban renewal, gentrification, and white supremacist policies. And the people in these communities survived underfunded schools and overfunded prisons. All of this cemented my faith that we would survive Trump.
Driving too slowly, however, could also attract attention, so to avoid getting pulled over, most black men at the time learned to drive a mile or two under the speed limit. A slower car in front could pose yet another problem for black motorists in Jim Crow states, where it was illegal for a black driver to pass a white driver.
Black Americans who went to mainstream banks for auto financing were generally denied loans, but even after World War II, the roughly 3 percent of black men who received bank credit were often charged higher interest rates than white customers. Moreover, black men living in the South needed a white man to cosign for a loan. (Women of any race were denied credit without a male cosigner until well into the 1970s.)
In 1930, a few years before Cadillac opened its showroom doors to African Americans, journalist George Schuyler addressed this issue, saying that “Blacks who drove expensive cars offended white sensibilities, and some blacks kept to older models so as not to give the dangerous impression of being above themselves.”
The exclusion of black people from golf courses as anything but caddies was commonplace, but in 1943 it was written directly into the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) bylaws that only “members of the Caucasian race” were allowed to join. (The clause was finally removed in 1961.)
George Grant, an African American dentist, made the most significant contribution when he designed the first golf tee, in 1899.
Twenty-three years after Grant invented his wooden golf tee, Joseph Bartholomew, a native of New Orleans and a self-taught golfer, became the first African American to design a public golf course.... As a black man, he was forbidden from playing on this course or any of the several he designed in New Orleans and across the state of Louisiana.
Presenting the illusion of access and then going to great lengths to employ a hidden, covert system to deny it constitutes an even more insidious racism, and one much harder to fight. For this and so many other reasons, the automobile was powerful for black physical and social mobility.
It’s likely that Esso’s benevolence for black people had been inspired by Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Esso’s CEO. Spelman Rockefeller, who was white, had been raised in Cleveland, Ohio, in a house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her parents, Harvey Buell Spelman and Lucy Henry Spelman, had been fearless and powerful abolitionists.
...in the conundrum of segregation being both a blessing and a curse, black-owned businesses especially benefited, largely because in many cases, black people were denied services and shut out of white America.
In 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi stated on the Senate floor that allowing black men to serve in the armed forces was a mistake that would “inevitably lead to disaster,” because once you “impress the Negro with the fact that he is defending the flag” and “inflate his untutored soul with military airs,” he would demand that “his political rights must be respected.”
Rockefeller (the CEO of Esso) was the chairman of the advisory committee at the United Negro College Fund, which he founded in 1944.
Today, many of the homes that were bought with the help of the GI Bill are worth ten times their purchase price and have provided financial security, retirement, and college tuition for three generations of the same family. Black GIs being denied access to this entitlement program is partially why today the average white American family has nearly ten times the net worth of the average black American family.
Route 66 tourist shops sell hundreds of products featuring Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Betty Boop, all in an effort to recapture a time that didn’t exist for black travelers, and only rarely for whites. The American ideals associated with Route 66, then and now, have usurped the true narrative, erasing the more harrowing aspects of the road’s past. Today, the Route 66 brand is so weighted with nostalgia that parts of the fabled highway are suffocating under an idealized past that never was.
The freeway system was tied into “urban renewal” projects that spanned America, which not only took tourism away from Route 66 towns but also decimated black communities. Urban renewal’s effect on black neighborhoods was even more destructive, as many of the new freeways bisected more black communities than white.
Freeways created physical and psychological barriers, dividing a nation that was already struggling to find common ground. And although this was a time when the country thought it was moving forward, the pendulum was actually swinging backward—and this time, when it did, it literally became a wrecking ball.
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, white business owners found that desegregation increased profits by broadening their customer base, and it gave some of them the courage they had needed to do the right thing.
Once black people could venture into new areas, they did. However, as more black travelers patronized white businesses, black business owners lost the support they had relied on, and many struggled to keep their businesses open. It was a no-win situation.
In less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, at least half of the Green Book black-owned businesses were closed, either through lack of support or through eminent domain, which allowed federal, state, and city governments to take over the land to expand freeway systems and for urban renewal projects.
In many respects, Nixon’s “war on drugs” essentially became a war on black communities, the places where Green Book sites once thrived. Apparently, Nixon’s plan worked. Just one decade after the Green Book ceased publication, the number of Americans incarcerated had doubled. And today it has skyrocketed to 700 percent of what it was in the 1960s.
Nearly every U.S. president since Nixon designed his own “get tough on crime” initiative, but it was President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill that was the worst. Among other outrageous provisions, it eliminated higher education for inmates, authorized the use of boot camps for delinquent minors, and allocated money for new prisons, contributing to the prison-industrial complex we know today.
Clinton’s Crime Bill kicked the pendulum of justice further back than any failed policies that attempted to address racial equality since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Once we locked up nearly a third of our black men, families dissolved, more black-owned businesses closed, and schools in black neighborhoods started to look more like jails. And once black men were released from jail, they couldn’t go back to their homes because it would be a violation of their parole; those who did go home put the whole family at risk for eviction. Only two years after the Crime Bill was signed, seventeen billion dollars that had been allocated for public housing was being used to build new prisons.
...“prison gerrymandering” pulls black people out of their communities and places them, at least in the census, into nearly all-white communities. Once these black inmates are counted as residents, the rise in population gives these towns more legislative power in Washington, while simultaneously disempowering the black communities the inmates left when they were incarcerated.
Avslutande ord
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Chapter 11: All black Americans wanted was the ability to walk, run, drive, shop, and live freely outside their neighborhoods, just like white people. After the Hampton House became another casualty to integration, community activist Georgia Ayers summed it up: "We got what we wanted, but lost what we had."
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The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the "black travel guide to America." At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and 'Overground Railroad' celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.
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I really enjoyed reading this book, especially for some of the stories that were in it and the fact that it showed the challenges that black travelers faced. I personally think that the book could have used a good final editing; however, it does not decrease the value as a historical document. (