99% Invisible - 201- The Green Book redux

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

The new film “Green Book” is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film, so I can’t speak to its merits or shortcomings, but while people are possibly being introduced to the concept of the Green Book for the first time, we thought we’d re-release this story from a few years ago about the origin and significance of the Green Book: the Negro Motorists’ Travel Guide to the segregated US. As a special bonus to our story, we also have a Green Book story from Nate DiMeo of the memory palace. Nate had coincidentally written his episode called “Open Road” and we both released them without having heard the other. I think hearing them one after the other is real treat. The Green Book Subscribe to the memory palace in Apple Podcasts or Radio Public

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The new film Green Book is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film, so I can't speak to its merits or its shortcomings. But while people are possibly being introduced to the concept of the Green Book for the first time, we thought we'd release this story from a few years ago about the origin and significance of the Green Book, the Negro Motorist Travel Guide to the Segregated US. It's an amazing story and one of my old-time favorites. As a special bonus in this episode, we'll also be playing a Green Book story from Nate Domeo of the Memory Palace. Nate had coincidentally written his Memory Palace episode called Open Road about the Green Book and we both released them without having heard the other,

and I think hearing them one after another is a real treat. It highlights our shows, similarities and differences in our approach to a subject. It makes me very happy to share them together today. I hope you like it. This is the American dream of freedom on wheels. An automotive age, traveling on time-saving superhighways. The 1940s, 50s and 60s were the golden age of road travel. Cars had become cheap and roomy enough to carry families comfortably for hundreds of miles. The Interstate Highway System had started to connect the country's smaller roads into a vast nationwide network.

Finally, tourists could make their way from New York to California, with the windows down and the wind in their hair, seeing the grandeur of America along the way. We have become the nation on wheels, with more motorized mobility than ever dreamed of before. But of course, this freedom and mobility wasn't available to everyone. That's our senior editor and splash of cold water to Laney Hall. Because in 1956, the year that federal funding made the interstate highway system possible,

Jim Crow was still the law of the land. In the south, racial segregation was enforced by law and had been since shortly after reconstruction. In many parts of the north, the codes were enforced in practice. And these codes could make a simple road trip really complicated for black travelers. How is this? Is that a good level? Is all you picking me up well there? This is Curtis Graves. Okay, my name is Curtis Graves and I was born in 1938, so I'm a little older than most of the people who are listening to this. Curtis would eventually become a Texas state representative,

and then he'd go on to work at NASA, and then he'd become a photographer. But as a kid, he grew up in the segregated south. And for many years, his parents tried to shield him from that reality. I've often said that both my mother and father were the best liars that I knew. For instance, we sat in the back of the bus because it was cooler there. We rode in the front of the train because you could get off quicker. We sat upstairs in the movie because you had better seats in the upstairs. Of course, that ruse couldn't last.

And by the time Curtis was a college senior in Houston, Texas, in the mid-1950s, he was fully aware of what it meant to be a black person living under Jim Crow. There's one experience in particular that stands out in his mind. He was just 21 years old and getting ready to drive to a college meeting in Waco about three hours northwest of Houston. He'd agreed to take a couple of acquaintances. They happened to be white women. I said to myself, I might be in for some difficult times here, but you know, I had to sew John. To get to Waco, Curtis had to drive through a stretch of East Texas that was notorious in those decades for racial violence. Oh yeah those communities were pretty bad. Around

dusk the travelers got hungry so they pulled over at a roadside diner. As soon as we got in the front door the guy said, ah, sorry but you can't come in here. We don't serve black people at all. So the three of them went back outside and Curtis devised a plan. They'd try another restaurant right across the street. I said to them, the two of you go in, get a table. And after you're seated and the waiter or waitress comes up to you, tell them that you have a boy that's driving you,

and that you want to know whether he can bring him in to eat. So the women walked inside and they asked the waitress if Curtis could come inside to join them. And the lady said, of course, no problem at all. So as long as I was that boy and their driver, I could eat with them at a table in a restaurant, but if I were equal to them, I could not. This kind of humiliation on the road was routine and had been going on for decades.

Many people wrote into the NAACP around this time, describing experiences just like curtices. To hold a make-in-surn, before starting our recent vacation trip to several Eastern states, I would like to report an incident occurring on January 1st at a golf service station in Macon, Georgia. My wife and I went to the restaurants to refresh ourselves, then found a vacant table ten minutes past and no one came to service. I keep. He informed me that the restroom for the color was in the back.

It seems to me dealers should not be permitted to sell gas and oil and not provide these comforts for us also. Some travelers would drive all night instead of trying to find lodging in an unfamiliar and possibly dangerous town. They'd pack picnics so they didn't have to stop for food. Some people would even carry portable toilets in the trunks of their cars, knowing that there was a good chance they'd be turned away from roadside restrooms. But since 1936, a guy named Victor Hugo Green had been trying to help with some

of these problems, to make life easier for thousands of black motorists. State by state, he'd been putting together a travel guide with listings of restaurants, hotels, and service stations that would welcome African-American travelers. He called it the Negro Motorist Green Book.ist Green Book, the Green Book for short. Victor Green, who died in 1960, lived in Harlem, New York during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. His apartment was not far from Duke Ellington's.

His office would eventually be situated near Smalls Paradise, a famous nightclub. Victor didn't have the most obvious background for starting a travel guide. He didn't work in tourism, he wasn't a writer, he was a mailman in Hackensack, New Jersey. But he kept hearing stories about discrimination on the road. So he would go do his route in Hackensack, New Jersey, come back home and work on a green book at night, compiling these addresses, typing them up and putting them in a book form. This is Calvin Alexander Ramsey, playwright, author, and filmmaker.

And years ago, Calvin started researching the history of the green book. He learned that the green book wasn't really the first guide of its kind. In fact, Victor may have gotten the idea from Jewish travelers. Because the Jewish community was also having issues on the open road with a lot of the places saying restricted, and that was a code word for Gentiles only. When Victor published his first green book, it just covered New York. And he heard from around the country from other carriers and other people saying we really need this nationwide. But it wasn't that easy to gather information from across the country from other carriers and other people saying we really need this nationwide.

But it wasn't that easy to gather information from across the country back then. Long-distance phone calls were expensive. And that, Calvin says, is when Victor Green realized that being a mailman was his secret superpower. There were African-American let-a-carriers all over the United States at this time. We're talking about 1936. And so he knew about, you know, the relationships that the male men have with their homeowners or apartment dwellers delivering their male. So just like today, the male man is part of the community. So Calvin says Victor tapped into this network, spreading the word about his guide through the National Alliance of Postal and Federal federal employees, a letter carrier union. Calvin says postal workers across the country scouted potential green book locations in their cities and towns. He says some even asked

families they delivered to if they'd be open to hosting travelers in their homes. And if they agreed, then they would send the information to Victor Green in Harlem. Victor was able to get a feel for us of let it carriers who are all over the country, who acquired materials and names and addresses and businesses for him. Wherever they were, the black male man, you had a Green Book salesman or recruiter. Pretty quickly, the Green Book caught on. Businesses, many black owned, began getting in touch with Victor, hoping to advertise and hoping to be listed. Black newspapers signed on as sponsors. Victor eventually retired from his job as a letter carrier

and started working on the guide full time. He even opened an affiliated travel agency that helped tourists arrange trips. But still, there was the challenge full time. He even opened an affiliated travel agency that helped tourist arrange trips. But still there was the challenge of distribution. How to get the guide into the hands of travelers who needed it. That happened in a few ways. The United States travel bureau signed on to help out and then there were the more informal networks. Well churches, Pullman Portters, the Urban League, the NWCP, the Masonic lodges. There was a very wide, very distribution process in place for these green books. And there was an important corporate. There's a smile for every mile at the SO sign.

The SSO makes your car go! And be mortering! SO, also known as Standard Oil, and now known as ExxonMobil, was one of the few oil companies back then that actively pursued black customers. They franchised their stations to African-American operators, and they had a black representative on staff, James Billboard Jackson, who helped place green books in many of those stations, as well as the White Own ones. S.O. may have done this out of a sense of fairness and equality.

John DeRocquefeller, who founded Standard Oil in 1870, had married into a family of abolitionists who were part of the Underground Railroad, and he'd voted for Abraham Lincoln back in the day. But SO probably did it for another reason too. Money, honey. It has to do with money. Remember Curtis, who had the crappy experience driving across East Texas? His dad operated one of the first black-owned SO associations in New Orleans where Curtis was born and raised.

It was called Bootsy and Buddies. The economic logic of stocking the green book was pretty simple, he says. If you want black people to buy your fuel, why don't you give them an opportunity to see that they can travel and find places to stay while they're on the road traveling. So Curtis's dad kept a shelf of green books for his customers. You know, somebody came in and said, buddy, I'm thinking about taking a trip to Chicago, my dad would say, well, do you know where to stop between here in Chicago?

And the person would say, no, he said, well, here. The Green Book will tell you. And it gave you a sense of security. And so the Green Book came to cover listings in all 50 states and even some locations in Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico. They printed about 15,000 copies a year. Victor Green had changed travel for thousands of African-American tourists.

He wrote in a 1956 introduction to the guide. Now, things are different. The Negro traveler can depend on the Green Book for all the information he wants. This guide has made traveling more popular without encountering embarrassing situations. But as the civil rights struggle continued, some people began to question the value of the Green Book. Black people many of them began to feel that this was accommodating to Jim Crow. Susan Rue is a professor of history at Brigham Young University, and she says that the Green Book began to seem a little out of step with the Times.

It rarely took on an overtly political tone, especially in its early days. And there were actually other black travel guides published around the same time that did. One called travel guide, for instance. Travel guide listed where the NAACP chapters were in each city. They were much more attuned with civil rights, much more political tone, eventually the NAACP

made it clear. And the NAACP said, what we're striving for, we're striving for integration. And so that's their stand. And the NAACP built a lot of their push for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, and ended Jim Crow around this idea of total integration. In fact, when the NAACP testified during the debate over the bill, they drew on all those letters they'd received about discrimination on the road. They appealed to that vision of the iconic family road trip of the freedom to explore America by car. Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, spoke before the Senate's Commerce Committee in 1963. As soon as Congress gets out, they're all gonna head into their station wagons and go back to their home district.

It's July in Washington. It's really hot. We'll concess the Senate to imagine what it might be like to travel as a black person. Would you like me to read what Roy Wachon said? How far do you drive each day? Where and under what conditions can you and your family eat? Where can they use a restroom?

Can you stop driving after a reasonable day behind the wheel? Or must you drive until you reach a city where relatives or friends will accommodate you and yours for the night? Will your children be denied a soft drink or an ice cream con because they are not white? So he's appealing to them and at the most basic level of their own love for their

own family. And Susan thinks this may have been one of the things that helped pass the bill. By framing the narrative of civil rights as a family travel narrative, they were able to convince the senators to vote for the bill. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law. The Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law, and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War 100 years ago. The Negro won his freedom then. He wins his dignity now. The Civil Rights struggle was not over then,

and it's still not over today. But for Victor Green, it became clear at some point that his Green Book had a limited shelf life. He wrote in the introduction to one of his guides. There will be a day sometime in the near future. 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. In sure enough, two years after the Civil Rights Act passed,

the Green Book published its last edition. So actually, could you just describe where we are? We're at the public library, downtown, the central branch in Los Angeles, and we're down in the bowels for floors down underground in the history and genealogy department. You have a stack of books there in front of you. What are those? They are green books. They're just little jewels.

I mean, I just buzzed with this kind of good energy that I just feel like, oh my God, they're actually here. It's amazing, it's amazing. Kandace Taylor is a photographer and a cultural documentarian. The guide she's holding are small, maybe eight inches by five inches. They have green covers, each with a different destination featured, and there are pages and pages of listings inside.

Let me see. There were beauty parlors, barbershops, tailors, taverns, there were nightclubs. It was really a social network. It was anything you might want to do in that town and the resources that were available to you. Kandace has been traveling the country documenting old Green Book locations from California to Oklahoma to New Mexico. Many establishments are now run by people who don't know much if anything about the police's history. by people who don't know much if anything about the police's history. Some of the buildings are gone and what's left is just an empty lot or a patch of grass. Even these original copies of the guide are rare now.

This Smithsonian bought one at auction recently. For $22,500. Wow. Yes. So look in your, if you're listening to this and you know your parents, you know, lived during Jim Crow, look in your adics and see you might have a, you know, 20 plus thousand dollar guide. You never know. Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money. But back in 1936, when the green book first appeared

and could be purchased for 25 cents by the travelers who needed it the most, it was arguably worth even more. Thanks to backstory with the American History Guides for the recordings of the letters to the NAACP, read by Alicia Floyd, Stephen Tulliver, and Leslie Telephario, and Al Letson, who played the part of Victor Green. Thanks also to Orlando Gonzalez at the National Association of Letter Carriers and Jackie Moore at the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees. We have another take on the Green Book from Nate Dimaio's the memory palace that you will not want to miss. Stay with us.

The memory palace is a long time member of the radiotopia collective in a huge inspiration in the creation of 99% of visible. If you don't already listen, you've made a huge mistake, my friend, and you're about to hear why. Nate is the best writer in podcasting, and the memory palace is a gem. This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet. The couple in the cover are ready for the road. He's square-jawed and strapping. She's

pretty, smiling-wide. He carries both of their suitcases because it's 1948 and he's a gentleman. In his dress like one, top-curred pocket square, Fedora had a jaunty angle. She's got her hair done, wavelette curls beneath her Sunday vest hat. The couple pictured there on the cover of the 1948 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book, with a very picture of a particular kind of African-American aspiration at mid-century.

In somewhere in those suitcases, or in her clutch, or in the glove box in the big old dash of the Pontiac or the Packard, is a book, a slim paperback, 30-40 pages, a guide for African-American travelers, 30, 40 pages, a guide for African American travelers, specifically for the lucky, the rare few who own to carve back then. And there they are on the cover, this handsome couple, drawn in black and white, walking off from their suburban home to look for America. Comforted by that guidebook, published each year since 1936 by the Victor E. Green Company of Harlem, in order to give, it says,

the Negro Traveler, information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments, and other understatements. The couple will use it to navigate the post-war, pre-highway United States, to keep themselves safe and alive, in their own car, free from the cruelties of segregated public transportation, of colored only waiting rooms, of backs of buses. They'll be in the front seat of their own car, their own gas pedal, their own steering wheel, on the open road, the radio on it, searching for their song, their music, in the open air.

You might catch a voice coming through the static, a rhythm carried on invisible waves from some rooftop transmitter and decatur or Memphis, and falling away as some skyline disappears in the rear view. And then coming in clear and strong now, as they come out of the trees, as the road rises through the Alligain easer, as they round to bend, and the air is warm to the windows, and warm on their arms, and the light is warm and tangerine, flashing on the surface of the snake river, or the Nishinabatna, or the Laksa Hatchin, driving off to, who knows, the grand tea-tons, Liberty Hall, the Finger Lakes, Beale Street, Pinkett Desert, in their own car.

Somewhere right then, South Paradise and Dean Moriarty were on the road. Somewhere right then, an ad-man was showing an executive, a pitch that would put a car in every garage. Some auto company lobbyist was showing some senator just where the freeways would run one day, through which unwanted neighborhoods, telling him how those freeways would free us all. How we'd road trip, see the USA and our Chevrolet, look for adventure in whatever comes our way. Milwaukee to Minneapolis in 4. our way. Milwaukee to Minneapolis in four and a half hours. Coast to coast in four and a half days. A nation transformed. A people on the move. It's great cities. It's natural wonders. It's amber waves.

It's purple majesty. All within reach. Unlimited possibilities of the open road. We're the couple on the cover drove right then, is the Sun Hungla, as their stations started to fuzz at the edges. The book said they could go to Oakland, stay at the Warren Hotel on 6th, eat at the Crescent in the Frederick, Maryland. See the Grand Canyon? Get a drink at Gill's Grill in Elizabeth Town.

But they shouldn't stop in Shelby Montana. There were no Negroes there. They should probably say they're delivering the cardo its white owners if they get pulled over outside Lafayette. Should steer clear of whole cities altogether. The sundown towns that were all white. By law. By nightfall.

There will be a day the Negro motorist Green Book says in the near future when it won't have to be published. But until that time there was the book and the couple there in its cover. As the sun goes down and the road stretches out and summer bugs flash white in the headlights and the signal fades, probably out for good this time. And they hope the gas holds out till Topeka. There's a place called Powers, the green book says. They can get service there.

And then they should be able to make it to Wichita. They packed in a food, they wouldn't have to risk stopping to eat. It might be better just to stay in Topeka by the time they get there. Book says there's a hotel there where they should be okay. It might just be better. We play it safe. And they drove on. And the moon rose over in open field.

Another take on the green book from the memory palace. If you somehow neglected subscribing to the memory palace here to 4, I actually kind of envy you because you have 134 episodes of short, beautiful, arresting history stories waiting for you. It's a life-changing show. This should be your Thanksgiving holiday entertainment, just shotgunning the memory palace episodes. Nate DeMoeo has been making the memory palace for 10 years and it represents the best

of the medium, so subscribe, download all the episodes, tell your friends, I'd love to see it reach 10 times as many people it deserves it. I'll have a link in the show notes. 99% of Usible was produced this week by Delaney Hall. The rest of the team is Senior Producer Katie Mingle, Digital Director Kurt Colstad, Avery Truffleman, Sharifusif, Emmett Fitzgerald Sean Riel, Vivian Lee, Joe Rosenberg, Taren Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Emmett Fitzgerald, Sean Riel, Vivian Lee, Joe Rosenberg, Terran Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in Beautiful, Downtown,

Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find mall at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99pi org or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want over 300 other episodes of 99% In plus links and pictures of the green book. Look no further than our beautiful, beautiful website. It's 99pi.org. Radio tilp you. from PRX.