American History Hit - The Road to Civil Rights

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Under segregation, African Americans' lives were severely limited. Restricted entry to public places, private businesses and public transport, cars provided liberty they were otherwise denied and protection from danger and discrimination. Gretchen Sorin, author of Driving While Black, tells Don that with the help of travel guides such as the Green Book, listing businesses that would accept African American customers - the car enabled African Americans to enjoy the freedom of the open road.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Tom Delargy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Imagine it's, say, 19449, and you're in the American South. Now imagine you're a world-class singer on tour by the name Mahalia Jackson,

a legend in gospel music, rapidly building a fan base elsewhere in the market. For decades, you've been working hard to reach the pinnacle of your profession. You and your band have just performed your third date this week, and you're plain exhausted. Exiting the stage door with flowers from your dressing room, you stop to sign a program and smile and wave to fans. The gig tomorrow night is about a day's drive to the south, but rather than head for a hotel and a warm, comfortable bed, you climb into your car ready to drive hours into the night.

Why? Because that local hotel doesn't rent rooms to people of color, nor will the restaurants serve you food. No. Tonight, like so many nights on this tour, will be spent in your car, at some point sleeping fitfully, parked at the side of the road. and you will arrive at tomorrow's engagement, hoping you got enough rest to be the top professional people are paying good money to see. So much for fame, fortune, and accomplishment in segregated America.

Hey, everybody, it's Don Wilden. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit. It is the most basic theme of American life to exist by the absolute freedoms accorded to any human being, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unalienable rights protected by the U.S. Constitution that underscore the essential. essential nature of what it means to be an American. It has created a culture, driven by a

pioneering can-do spirit. Being American means you're allowed to say what you think, do as you wish, move freely over borders. But for so long, and for so many, it did not. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, long after the abolishment of slavery, after black codes and the worst of Jim Crow, African-American populations north and south still had a profoundly different experience. in a profoundly different nation than the one enjoyed by white Americans. Segregationist rules, regulations, and legislations, designed to oppress, control, and disenfranchised, created a reality so systematically cruel

that it reached into every aspect of African-American life. These days, it's increasingly difficult for many Americans to grasp how sweeping this oppressive culture was. So it's helpful to focus this broader discussion on more relatable routines of everyday life. And nothing is more normal and relatable than climbing into one's car, shifting into gear and driving.

But in America, for black citizens, automotive travel has always been a different kind of road trip. That's why driving while black by Gretchen Soren is such an important and enlightening book. And I'm so proud to introduce the acclaimed author with us today. Greetings. Dr. Gretchen Soren. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Don. I have long wanted to have this conversation.

with you, so thank you for joining us. Automotive travel is such a fact of American life. It's such a symbol, but especially so for black Americans. Am I right when I say that? Yes, I think you're absolutely right. Having the ability to go out in your automobile, to go out in your car, and go where you want to go, when you want to go, to have that mobility is part of what it means to be in a democratic society, of living in a democratic society. Well, exactly. The ability to go where you want to go in your own comfort. I think that the idea of an automobile is such an interesting psychology, first of all, because when you climb into your automobile, it happens for all of us today, you close that door and you are in your own world. You're in a safe zone within your automobile. But as you drive, you're coursing through another world. And this is the way it goes anywhere. But that's the way it goes anywhere. But that's a problematic reality for black Americans, even today, but especially so in the eras that you're talking about in the earlier part of the 20th century, especially. If you think about what life was like before the automobile, people didn't go very far from home. They stayed right in their communities. The example I like to give people is, if you're driving through upstate New York, where I live, every single little town, there's a little town every seven to ten miles.

And every single little town has its own general store, its own post office, its own Presbyterian Church, Methodist Church, Episcopal Church. And one of the things my husband said to me was, why do all these little towns, why are there so many churches? Well, you didn't go to the next town over. You couldn't go that far. Everybody stayed right in their little community. But the automobile changes that. Yeah. Right?

You could go 10 miles, 20 miles, 30 miles to other communities. And it really shortens the distance. in the United States. And we made a decision as a country that we were going to be a nation of automobiles, that we were not going to depend on public transportation the way Europeans do. And so having that car to get around became essential to every American. And it particularly became essential for African Americans because public transportation was segregated. You didn't want to have to take the segregated bus and sit in the back.

You didn't want to have to take the Negro car on the train, which was filthy and rarely cleaned. You wanted the opportunity to take your own transportation where you didn't have to face the humiliation of segregation. And that's why the automobile was so much more important to African Americans than it was to white Americans. In so many regards, we can talk in parallel universes in this country. automotive travel is just one of them, but it's a great ubiquitous symbol for everyone in this country, historically speaking. But it's so interesting when you lay white American experience of automotive travel next to Black America, and it just really points up the difference because it's the same experience, it's the same cars, it's the same highways, and yet everything is different in the experience of it.

The book is conceived as both kind of a memoir but also a history. literally you you start every chapter with an italicized bit about your own family and your experience as an individual growing up in America in cars and then goes on to discuss it in more historical context. How much of your own experiences in this book in terms of that? I mean, how much did you experience that which we will discuss? You know, I think growing up in New Jersey, I started out doing this research thinking that this was not my experience at all, that this was not my experience at all. that this was not my story. I had never heard of the Negro Motorist Screen Book. I had talked to my mother about it when she was still alive, and she didn't know anything about it. And so I was really doing this as a purely intellectual experience. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized that this

was my story and that as a child, you know, I'm the product of the Great Migration. My parents, after World War II, my parents moved from North Carolina, where my mother was from, and where my father had served in the Army, to New Jersey. And then several years later, when I was born, you know, I grew up a northerner in New Jersey. But every summer, we went back to North Carolina to visit my grandparents or my grandmother and lots of cousins. And we would spend weeks in the summer in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And it really never dawned on me because we never stopped at hotels. We never stopped at restaurants. We always carried all of our food in the car. And it didn't dawn on me until we got deep into this research that there was a reason that

we never stopped at hotels. There was a reason we never stopped at restaurants. I started to realize the deeper I got into the research that it was my story. The other thing that I decided, discovered was that the Negro Motorist Green Book that everybody has heard about. There's a, the Hollywood movie about the Green Book. That was not the only travel guide. There were dozens of these travel guides. There was Grayson's guide. There was Traveler's Guide, the Travel Guide, and depending on who you were and what you needed a guidebook for, each one of these guides had a different audience. So there were guidebooks for people who were in show business. There were guidebooks for organizations that were churches or fraternal

organizations that needed 20 or 30 or 40 rooms for their conventions. So there were all kinds of these travel guides and there were advertisements in the back of black newspapers and Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine. So there were myriad ways that you could find out about places to stay and places to eat that were safe. And I think that's the key. I also did a lot of oral histories for this research. And one of the things I discovered was that my parents' generation didn't want to let my generation know how dangerous it was to go out on the road. And so we were the kids in the back seat that were clueless.

We didn't know that it was going to be dangerous when we were going out of the road. And I, you know, I interviewed Lonnie Bunch, who's now the Secretary of the Smithsonian. I interviewed a lot of scholars, African-American scholars, and who were all in my generation. And they told me the same thing. Well, as kids, we didn't know. We were in the backseat looking out the windows, playing games in the back seat, and our parents didn't stop when they traveled. And we'd eat by the side of the road.

They'd carry those big Coleman coolers, and there was food in those coolers. But we were just as clueless as we could be about the dangers to African-American families that were traveling. I want to talk about this in sort of macro and micro terms. macro, let's sort of nail down the historical outline we're talking about here. You speak generationally. The first great migration, first part of that is around the early teens of the 20th century going into World War I. A lot of people were coming up from the South for better jobs, but also to escape the discrimination that was happening down there. That generation generally moves by train because this is pre-model.

Pre-automobile, yes. Yeah, pre-automobile. Massive amounts of people, nonetheless, come. north towards Chicago, Detroit, etc., thus separating families, generations of families. And so you end up in the first iteration of this where people just have to go back for holidays or summer visitations for their sons and daughters to meet their grandparents and so forth. This becomes the first version of this that develops all the way over even to present day, because I'm married to an African-American woman and she has relatives in North Carolina.

it's still an issue, you know, of like, oh, got to go down south again and go see the family. That becomes this routine, which is obviously a very complex experience for people. Yes. And, you know, the, I can remember taking the train sometimes. My parents would take the train and we would take the seaboard coastline from Newark, New Jersey, all the way down to Fayetteville. And it was pejoratively called the Chicken Mone Express because there were all these black families on the train. who are going back south to visit relatives. But you're right.

And generationally, there's another wave of the Great Migration after World War II. Yes. And my parents were part of that wave of the Great Migration. And that's when the automobile really becomes the big story in this. Absolutely. Just like it does for the rest of the country. They've suddenly got this whole new fact of American life, which is, whoa, we are free and easy. We can just jump in our own car, never mind, the train, never mind.

mind the buses, all that hassle is gone, and we get to go wherever we want. Except for black Americans, that was a complicated situation. How much does segregation apply to the highways? Well, let me add one thing. There's another factor here that I think I should mention, and that's Henry Ford, because Henry Ford makes the automobile affordable. In the beginning, the automobile is very expensive, but when Henry Ford develops all the interchangeable parts and the the mass production of automobiles, the price of an automobile drops, and it becomes within the range of affordability for so many American families. And for African Americans, if you couldn't afford to buy a new car, you could afford to buy a used car. And everyone who could afford

it bought a car. And there is a rising middle class in Black America that's a result of this generational shift, this move north, better jobs, buying property. All of that is going on. And this middle class, just like an American middle class, enjoys a good car and wants to get that kind of transportation and freedom. The bigger, the better in some cases, whatever. The nicer the car, it's, you know, it's just a reflection of normal values of life. And that becomes its own sort of culture within itself, within those neighborhoods and towns. Absolutely. And Henry Ford also facilitated that because he hires African Americans to work in the Ford plants in Dearborn.

that gives them disposable income and they're able to purchase his automobile. So that was very smart on his part. But as African Americans move into the middle class, you're right. They want automobiles. And there's one thing that's very clear, and that is with black neighborhoods being redlined, it was often impossible for African Americans to purchase houses. They couldn't buy houses because in redlined neighborhoods, you couldn't get a mortgage. And if you couldn't get a mortgage, and if you couldn't get a mortgage,

and you had disposable income, you had more money to put into your second largest purchase, and what's your second largest purchase? That's going to be your car. So you had African Americans who could afford bigger and better cars than many white Americans who were also at the same time purchasing houses. That didn't always go down very well with white Americans. Interesting. You actually have a chapter that discusses the choice of car as a strategic

one to make how you want to portray yourself in society within your own community and outwardly towards the greater community. That's a very important choice to be making. I was actually fascinated thinking about, you know, why did my parents always drive Fords? They always drove Fords. And yet, if you were a Jewish American, you would never drive a Ford because Ford was a raving anti-Semite. And I started thinking about how the choice of your car is affected by who you are, by your identity. And for African Americans, bigger cars, heavier cars, were better. You wanted a car, you needed a car that was reliable that wouldn't strand you someplace in a scary white neighborhood. You wanted a car that could carry lots of stuff because when you traveled, you had to carry your food with you.

because you couldn't stop at a restaurant. You had to carry blankets and pillows because you might have to sleep in the car. You wanted a car that was comfortable if you had to sleep in it overnight. And so a big, roomy car that was harder for an angry mob to turn over was your choice.

And these were the kinds of decisions you were thinking about when you chose what kind of car you wanted to drive. And most African Americans chose big, heavy Buick. more than anything else? For the safety factor, for the protection factor. Wow, and also the living quality inside.

There's a whole passage about Mahalia Jackson, you know, these entertainers who would perform at a hall and because they either couldn't find a hotel to stay in nearby the hall or because it was just safer not to, they would drive through the night and, you know, rotate drivers through the night to the next locale. Often, in certain cases, they would sleep on the roadside. and so forth. That's how much a part of life that really created, that whole inconvenience of it all.

Exactly. And so many performers would perform in these hotels, in these clubs in hotels, but they weren't allowed to stay in the same hotel that they performed in. And so they had to drive on. They had to sleep in their cars or drive through the night. And she talks about being almost dizzy because she would go from gig to gig, sleeping basically in her car and eating fruit out of a bag, because she couldn't stop at a restaurant, and she was in a big Cadillac. I'll be back with more from Gretchen Soren after this short break. Sing, muses.

Sing to me a history of Olympus. And the deathless gods who govern Earth, sea, and sky. That is Zeus's command. It's the ancients from History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and every month on the podcast we're taking a deep dive into the Olympian gods. None of them are as simple or as single facet as we've kind of reduced them to in our heads when we think about the gods of the pantheon who do one thing each.

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That gets us into absolute key facet of how to understand the ancient Greek gods, which is that they are not good people. Join us as we explore some of the most fascinating deities history has ever known. Listen and follow on the ancients from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. We got this Oscar-winning movie a few years ago, controversial in its depiction of this really, and less to do with the Green Book than the title would have suggested. But it did tell us that this existed. The general American learned about this whole thing.

How effective were these guides to keeping people safe and comfortable and did it really work this system? I think from the East Coast to Chicago, these guides were pretty effective. I think from Chicago to the West Coast, they were less effective because they were relatively fewer places that African-Americans could stay.

Victor Green didn't have as many contacts, and there were fewer African-American communities. The sense I have is that the people that traveled the most, and those would be sports figures, performers, that they use the guide the most. And also, this is a time period when the major corporations in America,

places like Seagrams and Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, are starting to hire African-American executives to work for them and they have to travel. Those are the people that are finding the Green Book and other travel guides the most useful because they're using it all the time. And they're traveling with a lot of white folks

who are staying in. hotels and they've got to find a hotel that will take them. Right. Interesting. So I think the people that are traveling the most are finding them the most useful. Who was Victor Green? Victor Green was a New York postman who had a bad experience traveling and he decided that he was going to create this travel guide and we don't know exactly what that experience was. But he came back from a trip with his wife and it was a bad experience and he decided he was going to do something about it. I think he played a large role of the company, but at the late 50s, his wife takes over. So it really, we don't give enough credit to Alma

Green, but she steps in when he gets sick in the late 50s and it's really her show because she's running a public, a small publishing company with four other women. So it's a holy woman-owned publishing company by the late 50s. And they're operating it all over the United States and then the world. I mean, it expands so that they can tell you where you can stay in France or Africa and, you know, all over the world. And so it's a pretty remarkable business that they have. And I think one of the reasons it's so remarkable is that they had the support of standard oil. And the other travel guides didn't have the advertising dollars that the Green Book had. Interesting.

And standard oil, I think, was smart. Standard oil, which owned ESO gasoline, which is now Exxon. Right. So gasoline stations were smart because they allowed African Americans to use their restrooms. They were the first ones to say, you're welcome in our restrooms. And so black people who were a growing market, a growing middle class market, because they bought ESO gas, That helped standard oil. So it was a very smart marketing move on the part of standard oil to capture that market.

And I can remember my father always bought S-O. Do you know that it took me until just now to realize that E-S-S-O means S-O standard oil? I never understood that. I just realized that. Oh, my God, I'm so. I shouldn't be admitting that in public, but here I am on a podcast. So, standard oil, Rockefeller's oil. embrace to the black community. How interesting. That's an interesting thing. The Rockefellers have

always been involved in these kinds of issues. You know, they started Spelman, it was Rockefeller that contributed significantly to Spelman College. Yes. Spellman is his wife's maiden name. And so they have always, and continue to this day, to be involved in African American issues. And I think They were devout Baptists. Yep, yep. And I believe that that's one of the reasons the company was so engaged in supporting the African-American community. Yeah, he was big into the Samaritan story. Yes.

That's in his biography is how important that was to him early in his life. And the idea of helping others was a big part of the Rockefeller story. God bless him for that. Absolutely. At least that. The other thing that figures into this, not so much. your book, but in general is the Federal Highway Act and the expansion of America through these four-leaf cluster, oh my God, eight-lane highways that eventually take over America, which have the

double effect. I mean, it's very complex story, but it has a multi-effect on things. One of those things is the placement of those highway ramps in American cities are right over black communities, or at least impoverished communities, whoever they were. And therefore, and not. And not. impoverished necessarily, but just the place where the white people weren't. And those ramps went over and wiped out massive amounts of settlement. On the flip side of that, you have highways that no longer go through the towns and therefore black people who are driving are free from having to deal with that kind of hassle that they used to deal with. It's an interesting dichotomy there. Irony. There's a real irony there because black people wanted to stay on the highway. They

didn't want to drive through these small towns that were scary. Yeah. And where the, you know, how you would be received was unknown. However, you're right. The urban renewal and the building of highways wiped out a lot of black communities. It was the path of least resistance. Sure. And so politicians were perfectly willing to put these highways right through black communities.

So there is definitely an irony in the building of highways. I mentioned earlier that married into a family who came from a very vital community in North Carolina that had, you know, one of those black communities that was forced to live among its own, you know, segregated as they were, but therefore created a very vital community where John Coltrane is from and amazing people were raised in this very, very settled and very balanced community. Love the place. And then 1950s come along and they put one of those ramps right over that town. and wipe it out forever. And suddenly it's all memories. And I walked around there with an 80-year-old relative who talked to me about the barbershop and the saloon and all sorts of wonderful places that they used to gather and all destroyed by the creation of that federal highway system, basically, in so many places. And I remember my grandmother's house. We have photographs of my grandmother's house. And I remember being in that house as a child. And that house is no longer there because it was wiped out by a highway. Yeah, exactly. In Fayetteville, North Carolina.

So that happened to many, many communities. And I think only the estimate is that only about 7%, 5 to 7% of the Green Book sites even are still standing. Yeah. Because they've been wiped out either by urban renewal or by highway construction. Endings are a good thing in certain cases, even as much as the Negro Motorist Green Book was beloved. This era ends in the early 60s with basically the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Am I right, 1964? Yes.

How did that really end things like that? Well, the Negro Motors Green Book stays in business until 1966. They try to make the transition to being a kind of guide for everyone, but white Americans don't bite. They don't pick up on the Green Book. By this time, we've got the American Automobile Association. We've got the mobile guide, got the Sonoco guide. You know, there are lots of other travel guides, and the Green Book just isn't able to make that transition. I think the really sad part about the death of the Green Book is that there are so many businesses.

You know, there were these vibrant African-American communities that were really parallel to white communities. There were clothing stores and barbershops and beauty parlors and all of these businesses, guest houses, tourist homes, boarding houses that existed in African-American communities that go out of business. African-Americans are now able to go and stay at the Holiday Inn and Ramada Inn and the Hilton and Howard Johnson's. And because they can, they do. They fought so hard to be able to stay at these places. And it's not that all African-Americans desert African-American businesses. But enough people spread out over across the country do go and stay at the Holiday Inn or the Ramada Inn, that it really dilutes the businesses in the African American community and most of them go out of business.

So that's a very sad commentary on what happens to the black community. And it's not as much that African Americans don't go. It's that white Americans never go to these businesses. And so they just don't have enough business to stay viable. Then again, in certain places there is now this historic quality, the heritage of this era. We come full circle where these are now these beautiful, historic, known places that people of all sorts are staying in because of the stories they've told, especially on places like Martha's Vineyard, where, you know, resort communities have these historic black hotels, etc., where this story where Martin Luther King used to stay and so forth. It's an amazing thing to see and to experience. And Bruce's Beach, which is in California, was just actually given back to the family that owned it.

It had been taken away from them by eminent domain, and it was just given back, I think, last year. Yeah, right. So some of these places are being restored, returned. Sadly, many of them are gone, and they're just as a historic sign marker that says, American Beach once stood here or this was an African American resort community. What I love about your book is the complexity of the subject matter. It's a thread to that fabric that if you pull on, you're into the whole story through something very familiar and understandable to all Americans. The same thing can be true of buying a house and getting into

the story of redlining, the migration stories, et cetera. But these are ways to understand for all Americans, the sources of that which we are still dealing with and still discussing. And the complexity of that story and the sadness of it in many cases alienates a lot of people from the energetic experience of understanding it, the intellectual experience of understanding. Your book is a really accessible place to enter into that story and one that is a touchstone for so many because we all drive our cars. You know, I expected to be reading about what the title says, driving while black, the experience of an African-American, you know, in their cars and driving around, which it is to some degree. But it's a much bigger story. This is a tip of an iceberg

of a full journey throughout the entire segregation period for sure, but even beyond. Well, you know, it's funny because when I started the story, I thought I was just going to talk about the time period when the Green Book was in operation, which is 1936 to 1966. But the more I got into it, I kept going further and further back until I ended up starting with slavery and talking about policing and slave catchers and bringing it all the way up to the present because it really demonstrates for us where we are today with a relationship between African Americans and the police. So it becomes a much, much broader story and a much more complex story than I originally knew when I started.

A very long road trip through America in the 20th century primarily. The book is called Driving While Black. It's an incredibly entertaining book to read. And it's a good trip to take. There you go. I buttoned it up. Thank you. Well, and I'm glad you read it.

The author is Gretchen Soren. Gretchen, thank you very much for joining us. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you. Good to talk to you. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.