African Americans in the Jim Crow Era

Southerners often traveled from the north to visit relatives who did not join the Great Migration. A humble paper travel guide is often quite for a survival kit. The Green Paper often serves as a lifesaver. RELATED CONTENT A Brief Picture of a Gas Station How the Historical Green Book Helped African American Travelers Navigate a Segregated Country

Visionary Publisher Entrepreneur Victor Greene, a Postal Service Company in Harlem, The travel guide was introduced in 1937. For Black people who are not allowed into restaurants, hotels and restrooms, often putting themselves in greater danger if they drive after dark, this is an essential resource that lists several ways to Hundreds of institutions that deeply harmed African Americans.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation, Green's book sold for millions of dollars and was passed from one family member to another. This is a basic safety precaution for those who rely on it. Today it is a product of powerful discrimination.

Green Book is also the subject of filmmaker Ric Burns' fourth documentary. Burns is exploring the Green Book as a window into history and the present, where the black driving experience is once again at the center of our national conversation. I spoke with Burns about what he learned while making the film. Watch this exclusive clip from uping Ric Burns' documentary about "Green Book"

How did you first encounter Green Book

It was me A colleague of mine named Gretchen Sorin, who runs the Cooperstown Museum Institute and is a distinguished historian, had written a paper on Green Book decades ago. She came up to me not long ago and said, "Let's make a movie about this." And no one knows Green Book better than she does. She's really kind of self-made, doing oral histories, traveling to a lot of places, and amassing an amazing archive of material over decades.

And what drew you to the Green Book Project

I was born in 1955, so anyone who has roots in their own life or through their parents or grandparents is at a time when America was becoming car culture. people.

That's right.

You know, all these things like old Esso signs, motels, Howard Johnson's. It’s part of America’s inner imaginary. What non-African Americans don’t know is that this story has an entirely different cast of characters. It unfolds in a completely different way, so when you drive into Greenville, Texas, the banner says "Greenville, Texas." Black is soil, white is people. "You have a different experience in a family car."

We're making a movie called "Driving Black," which is about this period when, all of a sudden, black people in America The car saw the light of day like all Americans did. It's like liquidity. You have agency. You don’t rely on other people’s schedules or timelines. You can go wherever you want, wherever you want.

But for black Americans, suddenly, America's issues of mobility and race became a huge tinderbox. Now you as a black man are crossing the void. What should you do if your car breaks down? What happens when you need to refuel? What happens when your four-year-old needs to go to the bathroom? Where are you going to eat? Where are you going to sleep? God does not allow things like car accidents or medical malpractice to happen. How do you get to the hospital? Which hospital are you going to? I mean, all experiences. All of this, we are tied to the American experience in the most humble of ways. I mean, simple things. As soon as you have a car, you have that agency, but you also have those challenges.

[This film] is an opportunity to fill in the blanks on the map of the interior of the United States. You say, "Well, there was the Civil War, and then there was this thing called Reconstruction, and maybe Jim Crow meant something to people, but what was the thing that was really believable and reasonably organized about the 1920s?" The experience of race in America through the Civil Rights Movement?

What were some of the unexpected discoveries you made about the resource? ”

We were in it? In the first phase, filming just started. So those surprises are still there, but I would say the incredible thing about this topic, this whole field, is a surprise to non-African Americans.

, because you realize that there is a reality that you never really understood. Once it comes, this surprising revelation changes everything. One of the things that made this car so popular among black Americans was that it was difficult to see who was driving the car. As [Nobel Prize winner and economist] Gunnar Murdahl said, equality starts at about 25 miles per hour. All these carefully crafted codes (e.g., Black Americans must stop and give way to White Americans) started to go off the rails. When you travel through the highway world of America, you're kind of in your own closed world. You have the contact information you want. If you don't want to have contact, you can't have contact.

Making this experience all too familiar, for black Americans, is both joyful and very, very frustrating and sometimes fatal. Completely unknown to white Americans. Green Book for Black Drivers. Just one of them. Travel guide, travel guide. The cover of the Travel Guide has this great slogan: "Vacation and fun without shame."

Oh, that's great.

I love that Victor Greene took out Mark Twain's quote "Travel is fatal to prejudice" and put it on the cover of every issue. But the whole sentence is, "Travel is fatal to the prejudices, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness in which so many of us sorely need travel."

What else have you learned if you are a musician or Athlete, you do a lot of traveling in the United States, and cars make it easier to get where you want to go, and the Green Book makes it easier to find places to stay; however, driving black is always difficult. There is a painful bottom line here.

It incorporates the realities of the American experience. Thurgood Marshall has an incredible story about "Sundown Town." He was in Shreveport, and basically the police were saying, "Nigger boy, what are you doing here?" You better get out of town before sunset. "Who, other than African-Americans, happened to think of "Sundown Town" as a reality? The last Green Guide was published in 1966, and it was not in vain. Victor Greene said in an editor's note at the beginning that time will Soon enough, I hope, this guide will no longer be necessary. Until then, though, have a great time driving the Esso. , that's the way Mercer, consumerism, and capitalism are seeing marketing in new demographics, so God bless Esso and now ExxonMobil they see an opportunity and we're reaching out. . We're having this conversation because of Victor Green's relationship with Standard Oil, specifically,

in a special way. The leather book was on the map. My family, we drove our American Rambler to Esso Station in Delaware in 1958. Even if I could ask my parents, I did it in Lobos, Delaware. .There may not be Sunset Towns in Pennsylvania or Michigan, maybe they are not Sunset Towns in name only.

When you think about the overall narrative arc, do you see a kind of overall beginning, middle, end narrative arc that is going to be imposed on this movie”