Starting in 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a letter carrier who lived in Manhattan, published the “Negro Motorist Green Book,” listing hotels, restaurants and other businesses where African-Americans would not only be welcome but also safe. The “Green Book” series rather diplomatically described Jim Crow-era experiences with racist business owners as “painful embarrassments suffered which ruined a vacation or business trip.”
Filmmakers, photographers, writers and curators are now documenting Mr. Green’s legacy.
This weekend a film crew led by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and Becky Wible Searles will interview some of Mr. Green’s relatives for their documentary, “The Green Book Chronicles,” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
Ms. Wible Searles, an animation professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus, and Mr. Ramsey, a writer who has developed theater and musical versions of “Green Book” stories, have tracked down families who owned sites mentioned in the books or who relied on it for travel suggestions.
At times during interviews, Mr. Ramsey said, “People start crying, because they remember things.” Some had been told protective lies as children about why particular tourist routes were off limits to their families.
One contributor to his books described Mr. Green, who died in 1960, as “tall, well-built, always impeccably groomed, with an easy, affable manner.” He lived in Harlem, near his “Green Book” publishing office, and commuted to a day job delivering mail in Hackensack, N.J. He modeled his listings after Jewish publishers’ guidebooks for avoiding restricted places, where only gentiles could stay, and his Postal Service colleagues across the country helped him research.
“The mailmen would ask around on their routes” to find black and white business owners amenable to being listed in the “Green Book,” Mr. Ramsey said, adding that Mr. Green “had great leadership ability.”
Mr. Green published photographs of African-American entrepreneurs, including owners of Esso gas stations. His books advised readers to serve as “good-will ambassadors of our race among those who perhaps are unfamiliar with us.” He recommended New Mexico as a state where most motel keepers accepted “guests on the basis of ‘cash rather than color.’ ”
Ephemera like postcards and brochures for “Green Book” sites has been turning up, for modest prices. “We’ve been chipping away at that,” Ms. Wible Searles said.
Candacy Taylor, a photographer and cultural historian in Los Angeles, is documenting architecture at addresses listed in “Green Book” guides in collaboration with the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. The books, she pointed out, saved lives by steering travelers away from sundown towns, all-white areas where blacks and other minorities risked being attacked after dark.
Ms. Taylor is planning to adapt roadside images and collected stories for publications, exhibitions, films and apps. Next year Avalon Travel will publish her Route 66 tourism guide with “Green Book” locations. She said that she could also envision sites known for tolerance being commemorated with plaques. White and black business owners, she said, “should be celebrated for not accepting the status quo of the time.”
Preservationists are calling attention to neglected buildings recorded in the guides. (The University of South Carolina’s website has a map of various sites, and digitized books are available on a number of websites.) This year a motel in Birmingham, Ala., built in the 1950s by the insurance magnate Arthur G. Gaston, a grandson of slaves, appeared on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the 11 most endangered historic places.
Next Friday, “100 Miles to Lordsburg,” a short film about a black couple crossing New Mexico in 1961 and anxiously searching for “Green Book”-approved lodging, will be shown at the Plaza Classic Film Festival in El Paso. Karen Borger, its director, and Brad Littlefield, who wrote the script with Philip Lewis, are also working on “The Green Book Project,” a series of fact-based short narrative films.
The California African American Museum in Los Angeles will host a public discussion in April about the memories and memorabilia associated with “Green Book” travel. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, scheduled to open in the fall of 2016, will display a tattered copy of a “Green Book” from 1941 that it bought for about $22,500 at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan.