The Green Book: How a Travel Guide Helped Black Americans Travel Safely

Today most Americans take for granted that on a road trip they can stop for gas, a meal, a restroom or a bed more or less anywhere. Not long ago, Black Americans could not. Jim Crow laws, segregationist policies, local custom and individual bigotry made travel difficult and often dangerous. Families mostly faced that alone — but one organized answer lasted three decades: the Green Book. As one Myrtle Beach native later put it, it didn't rate the steak or the beds; it told you where you'd be safe and welcome.

Who made it

Why it succeeded

• It fit its moment. It grew out of 1930s activism such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" boycotts. Choosing to support Black-owned and welcoming white-owned businesses was a form of economic power — and the guide celebrated Black entrepreneurship, not only struggle.
• Cars meant freedom — with a guide, safely. Owning a car shielded Black travelers from segregated trains and buses, but a stranded motorist could end up in one of thousands of "sundown towns" that barred Black people after dark, or face humiliation such as being sent to a restaurant's back door.
• A built-in sales force. Green's fellow postal workers across the country signed up Black-owned businesses along their routes.
• Esso. James A. Jackson, a Black marketing executive at Esso (today's Exxon), made sure Esso stations nationwide sold the Green Book. Esso was known for welcoming Black motorists and employing Black workers, even as station franchise owners.

It wasn't alone: at least six other Black travel guides appeared in its lifetime, from Hackley and Harrison's 1930 hotel guide to Travelguide ("Vacation & Recreation Without Humiliation"), and even directories of Black lodging from the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior in the Roosevelt years. But the Green Book built the strongest brand.

A guide that kept changing

• World War II: rationing halted publication for four years.
• 1946: a relaunch with the first illustrated cover and the famous tagline, "Carry your Green Book with you… you may need it."
• 1947: as Black veterans were turned away from white colleges, it listed 106 Black schools and colleges and reprinted an editorial arguing for funding them — an unusually open political stance.
• 1951 and 1953: special editions on rail travel, featuring the Pullman Company, the country's largest private employer of Black Americans, and on air travel, with Pan American, American and Trans World airlines. International listings followed, reaching 30 African countries by 1963–64.
• 1956: after Brown v. Board of Education, it dropped gas stations, salons, drugstores and similar listings to focus on lodging and restaurants, and urged Black hotel owners to prepare to compete in an integrating market.
• 1961: editor Novera Dashiell openly praised the student sit-ins.
• 1963–64: a state-by-state summary of civil rights laws, "Your Rights, Briefly Speaking," urged readers to know and assert their rights.
• 1966–67: the final edition hailed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its public accommodations provisions.

Desegregation had a cost for the businesses the Green Book championed. As white-owned hotels and stores opened to Black customers, business drained from Black-owned establishments, and urban renewal and freeways razed or bypassed Black neighborhoods across the country. At least half of the Black-owned businesses in the Green Book closed within 10 years.

The women of the Green Book

Alma Green was involved from the start, though she wasn't credited as editor and publisher until 1959 — Victor, after all, worked full-time as a postman for 39 years. By 1959, four of the five staff on the title page were women, including assistant editor Novera Dashiell, the only writer with a byline, whose pieces were livelier and more political than Victor's.

Women also filled the listings:

• Tourist homes — rooms rented in private houses where hotels for Black travelers were scarce — were mostly run by married or widowed women. The Green Book listed more than 1,400; in Nebraska and Michigan outside Detroit, 90% of its sites were tourist homes. They offered safety, income and places to build the social networks that civil rights organizing depended on.
• Salons and beauty colleges often outnumbered lodging and food listings. Salons were gathering places, sometimes hosting organizing, driving clients to the polls, or receiving NAACP literature so it wouldn't go to clients' homes. Beauty colleges trained thousands of women to run their own businesses.
• YWCAs — 47 were listed — gave women safe lodging and fought lynching and segregated housing.

Among the women behind listed businesses were Geneva Haugabrooks of Haugabrooks Funeral Home in Atlanta, Alberta Northcutt Ellis of Alberta's Hotel in Springfield, Missouri, and Modjeska Simkins, who ran the Hotel Simbeth in Columbia, South Carolina.

Learn more

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library has digitized every available edition. Candacy Taylor's Overground Railroad: The Roots of Black Travel in America (2020) is the most comprehensive history, and James W. Loewen's Sundown Towns covers the dangers the guide helped travelers avoid.

Sources

Based on "The Green Book: An Historic Context," Park History Program, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.