With Jim Crow still looming over much of the country, a motto on the guide’s cover also doubled as a warning: “Carry your Green Book with you-You may need it.”įirst published in 1936, the Green Book was the brainchild of a Harlem-based postal carrier named Victor Hugo Green. The “Green Book” listed establishments in segregationist strongholds such as Alabama and Mississippi, but its reach also extended from Connecticut to California-any place where its readers might face prejudice or danger because of their skin color. In the pages that followed, they provided a rundown of hotels, guest houses, service stations, drug stores, taverns, barber shops and restaurants that were known to be safe ports of call for African American travelers. That was how the authors of the “Negro Motorist Green Book” ended the introduction to their 1948 edition. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.” That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published.
