‘Driving the Green Book’ podcast preserves history of Black travel
The idea of giving someone a ride home after a meeting doesn’t seem like a daunting feat. But if you were driving while Black in the 1950s and ’60s, it certainly could be.
Jim Crow segregation and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups often led to tense encounters — or worse — for Black travelers. Many relied on Victor Hugo Green’s “The Negro Motorist’s Green Book,” a travel guide for African Americans, to help them avoid risk.
One night sometime in the 1960s, Hank Sanders, now a 77-year old Alabama state senator, offered to drop a white woman off on his way home from a meeting. As they were driving down a dark road in Alabama, a truck began to tail him.
“He knew it was the kind of truck that would have a gun in the back,” said Alvin Hall, 68, an award-winning broadcaster who talked to Sanders for a new Macmillan Podcast series, “Driving the Green Book,” which launched last week on platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.
Eventually, the truck pulled up alongside Sanders’ vehicle. “He fully expected there was going to be a gun shot, he kept his eyes forward but was watching out of the corner of his eye,” Hall explained. Finally, the truck pulled ahead and drove off.
“That’s almost like a bad horror movie, and that story stays with me a lot,” Hall said. “Many people don’t realize how capricious it was back then, how truly capricious it was that in the sense that for Black people just being behind the wheel of a car was (an affront) to white supremacy.”
Started as a road trip
As host of the 10-week podcast series, which drops every Tuesday through mid-November, Hall aims to use stories of tense moments like this one — as well as happy memories — to resurface the history and value of the “Green Book.” His idea for the podcast came about three years ago.
“So many Black people and white people I knew did not know about the ‘Green Book.’ I would go to cocktail parties ... I was talking about the ‘Green Book’ and only a few people knew about it — this was before the movie,” he said, referencing the 2019 Oscar-winning film.
He decided more people needed to know. He had already done an audio documentary on the “Green Book” with the BBC, but it never aired in the U.S. So, he teamed up with Janée Woods Weber, 44, a social justice activist and the podcast’s associate producer, and embarked on a 12-day, 2,021-mile journey that started in Detroit and ended in New Orleans, visiting cities and places listed in the guide.
“Our show evolved from being a road trip, a journey along a path, into a journey into the memories and emotions of the people along that path and they would often in a moment connect the events they were talking about to today,” Hall said.
Traveling mercies
Originally published in 1936, the “Green Book” served as a guide for African American travelers to the restaurants, hotels, gas stations and other places that would serve them in a segregated era. It became a prudent resource to find Black-friendly businesses and services and even included essays about recommended behavior on the road.
Hall and Woods Weber explored some of the “Green Book’s” listings such as Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans and the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. They spent time with local activists, former Motown musicians, historians, entrepreneurs, professors and politicians. Many shared personal stories proving the value of the travel guide.
The stories vary, Hall explained: Some are inspiring, some are disturbing, some are funny.
William Williams, a professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, told Hall his family refused to travel without a copy of the “Green Book.” While the travel guide is praised today as innovative, it was, unfortunately, necessary to navigate local expectations, he said.
“Any white person could stop any Black person and make demands,” Hall said, noting that during segregation a Black person had no rights.
‘They might just pull out a gun’
Hall heard stories from Black people who had to wait at gas stations for every white person to finish their business before they could get what they needed.
“(If the traveler) looked at the person the wrong way — the gas station attendant — they just might pull out a gun,” Hall said.
The possibility of violent encounters is still a reason for Black drivers to be nervous on the road. Woods Weber’s heart fluttered while making their journey, more than 90 years after the “Green Book” was first published.
“While (we) were driving on some of the very roads that necessitated the ‘Green Book’ be created, it was unnerving to think that even now, 50 years later, my heart would still flutter when we would drive past a police cruiser,” Woods Weber said. “I thought, ‘Wow if I feel this nervous, what did that feel like 50 years ago?’ ”
“(The podcast is) making a connection between the past and the present,” said Maira Liriano, the associate chief librarian at the Schomburg Center, a division of the New York Public Library which holds an extensive collection of “Green Books.”
“So, if you’re talking to people today that remember using the ‘Green Books’ or other travel guides like this (who are) describing what their experiences were, I think that just brings home how discrimination from the past still lives with us today.”