A visiting exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center explores the history and impact of a vital document for Black people in the Jim Crow era. The Negro Motorist Green Book exhibit looks at all the ways the Green Book helped people navigate segregated America from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.
Harlem postman Victor Hugo Green created the travel guide, first publishing it in 1936 as The Negro Motorist Green Book and later The Negro Travelers' Green Book. It was a listing of restaurants, gas stations, hotels, department stores and other businesses that welcomed Black travelers.
"The Green Book embodied mutual aid in action," explains Trudy Gaba, curator for social justice at the Freedom Center. "Black communities, collectively and intentionally, became networks of support, providing not just a place to rest one's head after a weary day of travel on the open road, but a true sense of safety during profound moments of racial terror by white mobs."
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The Jim Crow laws period refers to the time from the late 19th century and early 20th century up until the end of segregation in the mid-1960s. The laws enforced racial segregation. The Green Book helped people know where it was safe to go, where they could find services and accommodations, and where they needed to avoid because of threats of violence.
The Green Book, Gaba says, "gave Black children the chance to have childhood summer vacations on the beach, and for civil rights activists, trusted places to organize."
Gaba says the exhibit is important because it helps visitors understand the importance of community care as, she says, civil rights are under threat.
"As more of our civil rights become endangered, we must build communities of interdependence and resilience if we are to withstand the dark road ahead. The Green Book is a roadmap of collective care for us all to follow," she says.
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Woodrow Keown, Jr., president and COO of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, adds "The Green Book is a light in a dark period in American history. It showed, as the Underground Railroad did a century earlier, that African Americans would not be denied their freedom and were prepared to prevail over the systems designed to oppress them."
Keown says the exhibit here has been in the works for six years, having been postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibit opens to the public Saturday and runs through Oct. 13. It's included in admission to the Freedom Center.
