page_title: The Negro Motorist Green Book
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: The Negro Motorist Green Book / Role of the Green Book / Influence
caption_attribution_description: Hotel Clark on Beale Street, Memphis TN
context_page_description: The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers. It was originated and published by African American, New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. Although pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African-American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could, but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African-Americans, eventually expanding its coverage from the New York area to much of North America, as well as founding a travel agency.
  Many black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult".
context_section_description: The Green Book attracted sponsorship from a number of businesses, including the African-American newspapers Call and Post of Cleveland, and the Louisville Leader of Louisville. Standard Oil (later Esso) was also a sponsor, owing to the efforts of James "Billboard" Jackson, a pioneering African-American Esso sales representative. Esso's "race group", part of its marketing division, promoted the Green Book as enabling Esso's black customers to "go further with less anxiety". By contrast, Shell gas stations were known to refuse black customers. 
  The 1949 edition included an Esso endorsement message that told readers: "As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign." Photographs of some African-American entrepreneurs who owned Esso gas stations appeared in the pages of the Green Book.
  Although Green usually refrained from editorializing in the Green Book, he let his readers' letters speak for the influence of his guide. William Smith of Hackensack, New Jersey, described it as a "credit to the Negro Race" in a letter published in the 1938 edition. He commented:
  It is a book badly needed among our Race since the advent of the motor age. Realizing the only way we knew where and how to reach our pleasure resorts was in a way of speaking, by word of mouth, until the publication of The Negro Motorist Green Book ... We earnestly believe that [it] will mean as much if not more to us as the A.A.A. means to the white race.
  Earl Hutchinson Sr., the father of journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, wrote of a 1955 move from Chicago to California that "you literally didn't leave home without [the Green Book]". Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, used the Green Book to navigate the 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Arkansas to Virginia in the 1950s and comments that "it was one of the survival tools of segregated life". According to the civil rights leader Julian Bond, recalling his parents' use of the Green Book, "it was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat, but where there was any place". Bond comments:
  You think about the things that most travelers take for granted, or most people today take for granted. If I go to New York City and want a hair cut, it's pretty easy for me to find a place where that can happen, but it wasn't easy then. White barbers would not cut black peoples' hair. White beauty parlors would not take black women as customers — hotels and so on, down the line. You needed the Green Book to tell you where you can go without having doors slammed in your face.
  While the Green Book was intended to make life easier for those living under Jim Crow, its publisher looked forward to a time when such guidebooks would no longer be necessary. As Green wrote, "there will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go as we please, and without embarrassment."
  Los Angeles is now considering offering special protection to the sites that kept black travelers safe. Ken Bernstein, principal planner for the city's Office of Historic Resources notes, "At the very least, these sites can be incorporated into our city's online inventory system. They are part of the story of African Americans in Los Angeles, and the story of Los Angeles itself writ large."
caption: The "Colored only" Hotel Clark in Memphis, Tennessee, c. 1939
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