In the second Great Migration, southern black Americans surged north. His book wasn’t the first such guide, but it was by far the most thorough. Green enlisted fellow letter carriers to help find more sponsors. By 1938, the booklet had 220 local advertisers, giving its creator the means to map the nation. Victor Green, a postal worker and creator of The Negro Motorist Green Book, lived in segregated Harlem, and his first two editions focused on the immediate neighborhood.
In Overground Railroad, Candacy Taylor meticulously reconstructs the Green Book’s quarter-century-plus of operation. For mid-twentieth-century black Americans, the Green Book travel guide was a potentially lifesaving search engine.
Even sundown towns-communities across the nation that violently banned African Americans after dark-didn’t always advertise their own rules. White supremacy drew its power from the ritualized humiliation of black people having to ask if a public service was available. The cruelty of a whites only placard may seem like the bookend to Bull Connor’s gross brutality, but such signage implied that the dangers and humiliations of Jim Crow always came labeled. The signage of segregation, terrible and tangible, left us with a deficient vision of Jim Crow America.
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