Green Book Leads the Way

As more African Americans sought to travel for business and pleasure in the 1930s, Jim Crow laws in the South and discriminatory practices elsewhere posed severe dangers. Victor Hugo Green had a solution.

■ Green, a mail carrier, and his wife, Alma, moved to Harlem in 1918, at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.

■ Inspired by Jewish travel guides and using his postal worker’s knowledge of the city, Green compiled lists of hotels and restaurants that catered to African Americans. The first Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936 was only 10 pages and limited to metropolitan New York. Even so, readers loved it.

■ The guide grew more comprehensive each year. Green gathered information from postal workers in other states, and worked with the U.S. Travel Bureau’s Negro Affairs department. By the 1940s, the Green Book listed thousands of businesses across the country that were Black-owned or verified to be nondiscriminatory. Green’s annual print run reached 15,000 copies.

■ Lists were longest for cities, but most areas were represented, however slim the pickings— Alaska, for instance, had just one entry in the 1960 edition. In places where no inns offered lodging to African Americans, the Green Book listed private individuals willing to rent rooms.

■ In 1949, the Green Book expanded to include listings for Bermuda, Mexico and Canada.

■ Standard Oil—Esso—was an early franchiser to African Americans, and its stations were popular spots to buy Green Books.

■ The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation of public facilities, made the Green Book obsolete. It ceased publication in 1966. Green predicted its demise, even welcomed it, in his introduction to the 1949 edition: “It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”