The Jim Crow Guidebook | SocialistWorker.org

27.1.11

The Jim Crow Guidebook | SocialistWorker.org: "WHERE DID Blacks use the bathroom, get a drink, safely stop for gas, and perform all the other quotidian acts of road-tripping under Jim Crow segregation? I had seen references to a "Negro" guidebook in the New York Times, but never actually read one until a good friend, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, posted the link to the 1949 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book on Facebook (download it here).

The book, named after Victor H. Green, a Harlem postal employee and activist who initiated the annual pamphlet in 1936, was published for three decades to help Black travelers avoid the humiliations and confrontations of passing through a segregated North America. Or, as the cover reads, it was "An International Travel Guide: USA, Alaska, Bermuda, Mexico, Canada." (Note to Tea Birthers: Alaska, like Hawaii, became a state in 1959.)

There are several striking aspects to this fascinating artifact of American history, not the least of which is that it guides African Americans through the racial minefields of the supposedly integrated American North and West."