The Negro Motorist Green Book

The New York Times previews a play and a forthcoming children’s book about a nearly forgotten travel guide that helped African Americans (and African Canadians) navigate the segregated accommodations that prevailed into the 1960s.

A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome….

Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end…

“The ‘Green Book’ tried to provide a tool to deal with those situations. It also allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism,” [said Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture].

In the introduction to his guide, which became known familiarly as, “The Green Book,” Victor Green wrote, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”

It ceased publication in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.