Imagine you're on a road trip with your family.
The year's 1954 and you're black.
Segregation is law in the South and basically practiced everywhere else in America.
You're traveling down the famed Route 66 and you've just reached
Albuquerque, New Mexico for the first time.
There's not another town for miles and you want to pull over and sleep for the night.
There are over a hundred motels to choose from, but less than eight will
take you in.
Picking the wrong one could lead to a humiliating encounter or worse,
a violent one, but there was actually a way to know where you'd be welcome.
It was in the Green Book.
Americans fell in love with the idea of the road trip in the mid-20th century.
A growing middle class meant more people had cars and jobs with paid vacation time.
And a newly built interstate highway system meant the country was
accessible to a big part of the population for the first time.
The open road indicated freedom and traveling by car reflected Americans' image of
themselves: self-sufficient, curious, and spontaneous.
It was a way for families to
spend time together and see the expansive country they called home, to
experience America's cultural and natural diversity.
Through the 1950s and
'60s, the highway became the most common way for American families to travel.
Motels and roadside attractions sprang up along the highway to accommodate
travelers needing a place to sleep or eat at any point on their journey.
But that freedom didn't extend to all Americans.
Black motorists were turned
away from the roadside hotels, gas stations, and restaurants that had taken
over the American landscape.
Some places were so hostile that it was unsafe to
even get out of a car.
Sundown towns forcibly expelled African Americans at night,
sometimes violently.
Black families had to take prepared food, in case they
wouldn't find a restaurant that would serve them, extra gallons of gasoline in
case filling stations wouldn't sell to them, and even empty coffee tins in case
they couldn't access a bathroom.
They carried blankets and pillows knowing
that finding a safe place to sleep could mean camping by the roadside or driving
long hours into the night, even though they had money to pay for a hotel.
Sometimes, that distance was fatal.
It was the exact opposite of the spontaneous
American road trip.
But thanks to a Harlem postal-worker-turned-travel agent,
knowing where to go wasn't a total shot in the dark.
In 1936 Victor Hugo Greene collected information on hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, and
mechanic shops that would reliably serve African Americans in New York City.
He called his Travel Guide "The Negro Motorist Green-Book" and began publishing
an updated version each year,
using his network at the United States Postal Service,
which was one of the largest single employers of African Americans at
the time.
Green put together detailed information on businesses and private
homes that would welcome black travelers.
The Green Book eventually grew to cover
locations in all 50 States and sold ad space to businesses all over the country.
With the help of Esso, now ExxonMobil, as a progressive corporate partner and
distributor of the guides, around 15,000 copies of the Green Book started selling
each year.
Victor Greene's once-16-page booklet ballooned
to over a hundred pages and became a stable item for black families who
wanted to participate in the joy of cross-country travel.
And it turns out
that iconic image of the open road, of freedom and family values, would become
an anchor in the Civil Rights movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King even mentions it
in his "I have a dream" speech.
The Civil Rights Act ended legal segregation
in 1964 and just two years later the Green Book went out of print.
It had become obsolete.
And as the road cut through the broad plains, you felt the
tremendous space all around you. A country rolling out to the horizon,
and you rolling with it.
It was beautiful and you sort of sensed the real meaning behind
the word "freedom".