The Jim Crow Guidebook

[Hannah Bell]

I had seen references to a "Negro" guidebook in the New York Times, but never actually read one until a good friend, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, posted the link to the 1949 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book on Facebook (download it here).

The book, named after Victor H. Green, a Harlem postal employee and activist who initiated the annual pamphlet in 1936, was published for three decades to help Black travelers avoid the humiliations and confrontations of passing through a segregated North America. Or, as the cover reads, it was "An International Travel Guide: USA, Alaska, Bermuda, Mexico, Canada." (Note to Tea Birthers: Alaska, like Hawaii, became a state in 1959...)

The 1949 edition, taken from the collections of Henry Ford, was not only sponsored by small businesses that catered to Blacks, but by Ford Motor Co. and Esso Oil, which were among the early corporations to explicitly market to African Americans... Given Henry Ford's well-known collaboration with the Nazi regime, his company's sponsorship is notable for its plying for business among both murderous racists and the rising postwar Black American working class. Esso, the precursor to Exxon, of course, made its billions off extracting wealth from lands largely inhabited by non-whites, and to this day is guilty of environmental racism. But Blacks were a growing market in 1949 and the ideology of Corporate America has always been profits first...

After passing along the guidebook to my partner, who is Black, she passed it on to her 5th-grade daughter's teacher, who had recently assigned her class a magnificent novel that teaches 10-year-olds about the civil rights era, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963. In that book, the Watsons, a Black family, must pack along food to avoid stopping in places where no accommodations were available to them.

Next year, the teacher plans to distribute copies of The Green Book as part of the lesson plan so that young children can begin to grapple with the realities of this nation's racial past. I think it's a magnificent idea for a teaching tool, especially for a generation that is being falsely taught to believe that racism is a thing of the past.

The guidebook ceased publication in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed. Today, it provides an amazing window into the criminal realities of American life not so many years ago. And some context for the ongoing institutional racism and informal segregation of our society to this day. Pass it on.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/26/the-jim-crow-guidebook

[ashling]

1. About 30 years ago I temped as a paralegal

for Gulf Oil (and a couple of weeks for Shell) in Houston. It was a big project to go through the archives of the legal depts. of those companies to abstract information to be turned over in discovery for a suit having to do with dealers in MA.

In going through boxes and boxes taken from these archives I read letter after letter from African Americans to Gulf complaining of their treatment at Gulf stations traveling through the South.

[maryf]

2. K&R nt

[CRK7376]

3. Thanks for posting this

Neat article. I downloaded it and will use it in my classroom in the future.