Many viewers were surprised by the multiple Oscar-winning film Green Book (2018), not only for beating such worthy contenders as The Favourite and BlackKKKlansman, but for its depiction of the hazards faced by African American travelers. As late as the 1960s when Green Book was set, blacks were refused service in many hotels, restaurants and even gas stations. The Green Book from which the movie took its name was an annual guide to businesses that served and accommodated African Americans on the road.
With Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, essayist-photographer Candacy Taylor explores a less-known chapter of our country’s racial history. She collects mid-century stories of the hazards of black men with expensive cars—they kept a chauffer’s hat handy and claimed they were driving the car for their employer. The wife in the front seat was identified as the maid and the kids in back as her children. Deputies sent them hard glances and usually let them pass. Without a good story convincingly told, an African American could end up in a heap of trouble—maybe injured or even dead.
Driving on Route 66 in the 1950s, blacks could travel hundreds of miles between motels where they could sleep. Along the way they encountered “sundown towns” that banned them after dark. One such town was a St. Louis suburb called Ferguson.
The annual Green Book directory was named for Victor Green, a Harlem postal worker with an entrepreneurial streak. Seeing the need for reliable information, he launched “The Negro Motorist Green Book” in 1936 as a directory of black-owned or black-friendly hotels, taverns, restaurants, roadhouses, service stations and resorts. Taylor not only read the surviving issues (the Green Book lasted through 1967—just after the passage of civil rights legislation) but traveled across the continental U.S. in search of sites listed in the Green Book. Most have vanished. Some are in ruins. A few are still operating. She brought her camera and her handsomely produced book includes many of her photographs along with archival stills and pages from various editions of the Green Book.
Despite the end of legal segregation and the advances made by the civil rights movement, Taylor’s journey forced her to conclude that in some respects, the situation for African Americans has worsened since the Green Book years. The number of black-owned businesses has plummeted, sending once vibrant if repressed communities into downward spirals of poverty. She reports that one cause among many was the outflow of black money from their own community to newly accessible white businesses. That’s not the end of it: Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and Bill Clinton’s tough on crime policies resulted in the mass incarceration of black men. The dream of a color-blind future at the end of the open road has become a nightmare.
