I was traveling back from Houston when I received a very unique tweet from PoliticalJones:
WHAT! You mean there was a black travel guidebook in the 30s, 40s adnd 50s?
It turns out that my idea of creating a series of “Black” Travel guides is certainly not a new one! A Harlem man named Victor H. Green created a guidebook for black motorists to guide them on road travel during the precarious 30s, 40s 50s and 60s. The New York Times writes:
A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” — became abbreviated, simply, as the “Green Book.” Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.
Check out this cover from the 1940 edition:
Here is a another cover from the 1949 edition:
Check out the rest of the article here.
