Alvin Hall - Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

A selection The Green Book covers from 1939 to 1961, during its three-decade publication history.

Y ou would think that my journey with The Negro Motorist Green Book would have begun in an automobile. In fact, it began in a plane. The year was 2015. I was flying to London and, as I often do, had brought along a stack of magazines to pass the time. One article about road trips around the US referred in passing to The Negro Motorist Green Book. As far as I remember, it probably mentioned that the travel guide had been used by Black travelers during segregation, but I dont recall the word segregation itself being used.

My interest was immediately piqued. I had never heard of the publication. Thats not surprising considering that I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s dirt poor, living on land my family owns in the rural Florida Panhandle. The phrase dirt poor means we possessed only that parcel of land that we lived on, growing and raising most of what we ate. Most Black people in the area lived along sandy, unpaved roads that wove through scrub pine forests with a few live oak trees draped with hanging moss. Lots of raccoons, opossum, squirrels, snakes, birds, and insects lived in the underbrush. The landscape was not verdant. It always looked slightly dry. But it was always humid because the area was near the Gulf of Mexico.

We did not own a car. We could not afford one. We never traveled for vacations or other leisure activities. We only traveled to visit relatives, usually being driven by a family friend who owned a car, to places we could reach between sunrise and sunset. No one I knew drove overnight. So, my family would have had no need for The Negro Motorist Green Book. Nonetheless, the publications name and the articles brief description captured my imagination. I resolved to find out more.

Back in New York after my work in London, I began my search by going to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Located in Harlem and part of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg, as it is widely known, is Americas premier archive for African American history. It contains a remarkable and growing trove of documents and artifacts about crucial, often little-known or overlooked histories, facts, and stories about Black Americans and their lives. Important for my purpose, and unlike any other archive I know, its collection of the publication I was looking for is almost complete; it lacks only one of the editions of The Green Book, which was published annually (except when publication was temporarily suspended during World War II) from 1936 to 1967.

There, while I sat in a conference room in the rare books section, associate chief librarian Maira Liriano brought me copies that I could hold in my hands and examine at leisure. (This is no longer possible; the paper they were printed on has become too fragile.) What I saw and read were listings of largely Black-owned enterprisesbusinesses that welcomed Black travelers in city after city and town after town across the US. I was amazed. Tallahassee, Florida, the nearest large city to where I grew up, was one of the first places I checked. Much to my surprise, I saw a listing for a lodging that I had never heard of, the Abner-Virginia Motel, on a street I knew well, Railroad Avenue. My relatives and I must have gone by it many times when going to Tallahassee to buy groceries or to see a doctor, but, not knowing its significance, I never paid any attention to the place.

As I turned the pages of The Green Bookperusing listings in other cities where I had lived or visited, scanning articles featuring major US vacation destinations, reading tips about how to prepare your car for a trip and even advice about how to dress to project a respectable image while driving in your carone question echoed repeatedly through my mind: Why had I never heard of this publication?

Then, just as I was beginning my research at the Schomburg in late 2015, I got an email from Jeremy Grange, a producer of radio programs at BBC Wales. In what seems a striking coincidence, he asked whether I would be interested in working with him as a presenter (called host in America) on a documentary about The Negro Motorist Green Book for BBC Radio 4. Without hesitation, I said yes. At the time, almost none of my friends in New York and other US cities had heard of the publication. The fact that Jeremy, a BBC producer living and working in Wales and not in the US, had also come across a mention of The Green Book in an article and thought it would serve as the basis for an interesting, informative documentary made this opportunity feel profoundly fated. A quotation by James Baldwin kept coming to mind: A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on that journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you. I cant tell you the number of times I thought of these wise words and how prescient they proved to be in the journey ahead.

I COULD NOT HAVE KNOWN then that my exploration of The Negro Motorist Green Book would include two road trips. The first onefive days in the spring of 2015started in Tallahassee, Florida, and ended in Ferguson, Missouri. Organized by Jeremy Grange, its purpose was to produce the thirty-eight-minute radio documentary. He and I conceived of the program as traveling not just through space but through time as wellmy lifetime: from where I grew up in the Jim Crow South, where laws severely limited the rights of Black people as well as the social interaction between Black and white people, to the momentous contemporary events at that time in Ferguson. Jeremy, photographer Jonathan Calm, and I followed part of what is called the United States Civil Rights Trail, which links those cities, primarily in the South, in which African American activists and supporters from all ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds marched, protested, and endured personal danger, sometimes death, during the 1950s and 1960s, to fight for the right to vote, for racial equality, for social reform, and for fair legal treatment in all parts of life in the United States. We stopped in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and finally, Ferguson, Missouri. We visited the locations of once-fancy and well-known hotels, tourist homes, restaurants, eateries, movie houses, and nightclubs that had been listed in