“To compile facts and information connected with motoring, which the Negro Motorist can use and depend upon.” That was the simple goal stated by Victor H. Green, the creator of The Negro Motorist Green Book (today commonly called The Green Book). He launched the publication in 1936, a time of segregation in America and "Jim Crow" laws [state and local laws enforcing racial segregation] throughout the South, when "driving while black" was even more difficult and hazardous than it is today.

The 1947 edition of the Green Book. Photo courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties as part of the rural “dirt poor” in the South, my family was unaware of The Green Book. We had no car and there was no public transportation except for the Greyhound bus that came along our road once or twice a week. Instead, we depended on relatives – Uncle Son, Sus’ Lizzie, Cousin Ollie Mae, Mr. Buddy Alton – who owned cars or “a piece of a car,” as they would say, to drive us to town to buy groceries and clothes, to the clinic in the local county seat, to the doctor in the city, and to visit relatives in other towns and villages. I first learned about The Green Book many years later while reading an article about traveling through the Southern US.

Earlier this year, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, I was able to read through many of the annual editions of The Green Book. I started by looking for locations in Tallahassee, Florida’s state capitol, only 20 miles away from the small village near where I grew up. I found a couple of hotels described as friendly to black travellers that had appeared in various editions of the guide. Later, I would discover that author James Baldwin (a personal hero) and musician Ray Charles had stayed at these hotels. Much to my surprise, the buildings (or parts of them) still stand at their original locations in the black section of Tallahassee, although they are now being used for totally different purposes.