One of the most important tools for Black people in US history was started here in New York City, though much of the country’s population remains unaware of its significance.
Harlem resident Victor Green created The Green Book in 1936 as a printed resource for Black travelers. Yearly editions that followed the first two, which were NYC focused, expanded to the rest of the country, allowing travelers to plan their routes and stays to avoid harassment, unjust arrest, injury or worse in many US destinations. Among such places were sundown towns, predominately white communities that harassed or attacked people of color who stayed past nightfall. The Green Book offered spaces to shop, dine, find entertainment and stay overnight during a time when racial tensions were at peak levels (the final edition was published in 1966).
But the story of Victor Green and The Green Book has not been told as widely as it should. Candacy Taylor, a documentarian, archivist and the author of Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, is on a mission to change that and reintroduce the story to the world.
Courtesy, Candacy Taylor
We spoke to Taylor, also the curator of traveling Smithsonian exhibit The Negro Motorist Green Book before the exhibit heads to its next stop in March. Read on to learn what Taylor has planned for the show, her research process and the lasting impact of The Green Book on New York City and beyond.
How did you discover the Green Book and begin to champion its story?
Candacy Taylor: I stumbled on it by accident, when I was commissioned to write a Moon Travel Guide on Route 66. Once I learned about it, I was like, Oh, this is the project! It was a blessing in disguise.
Courtesy, Candacy Taylor
I was at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, and they had a Green Book tucked under glass in a corner at a Route 66 exhibition. I’d never seen such a thing; I never even knew it existed. When I learned that half the counties on Route 66 were sundown towns I thought, well, how do Black people drive Route 66? There were 89 counties on Route 66; it goes through two thirds of the country. It’s such a large area that I thought, my God, Black people can’t even drive this important route [a subject that Taylor later wrote about for The Atlantic].
How much work in total have you put into documenting Green Book history?
CT: I’ve been obsessively researching and collecting content and doing all the field research. I’ve traveled over 100,000 miles and documented over 250 Green Book sites. It’s been a labor of love for the last 10 years or so.
Courtesy, Candacy Taylor
You’re the curator for a traveling Smithsonian exhibit that will have gone to 13 museums by this fall. What can you share about the exhibit? Is a lot of your documentation on display?
CT: I’ve been collecting all these artifacts on display; they’re rare because less than 3 percent of Green Book sites are still operating. We’ve lost a lot of this history already, so to have these artifacts traveling in the exhibition is a huge deal. The exhibit requires a lot of space because it has pieces like a 13-foot neon sign from a Green Book site. It also includes my photographs of the sites along with stories from people who’ve had different experiences driving through Jim Crow in America—not just the South.
I’m glad you mention that. Historically, school education made it seem like the North was a haven for Black people during the Jim Crow era. We’ve learned, thanks to research and people documenting the subject, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Have you uncovered any of that? Does anything stand out in the North?
CT: Learning about Route 66 was really telling because it starts in Chicago. There were hundreds of sundown towns in Midwestern states such as Illinois but only a handful in Mississippi.
People were fleeing racial terror in the South, but they found that Jim Crow had no borders—there was still incredible segregation, violence and danger while traveling in the North, Midwest and West. What was so insidious about the North is that because there was no map of sundown towns at that time, you found out you were unsafe inadvertently, that you may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "Travelers' Green Book: 1963-64 International Edition"
Even in New York City, where they didn’t have white vs. colored signs, they still had redlining and urban renewal and other state-sanctioned forces that separated the races. Segregation thrived with people like Robert Moses. For example, some have written that he would intentionally build bridges low because he figured Black and brown people didn’t have cars and would be kept away from places like Jones Beach because the buses couldn’t pass under the low overhead of the bridges. He was wrong because there were middle-class Black people who could drive and had cars. But to go to those lengths to separate races was insidious, targeted and intentional.
Though it did become national in coverage, the Green Book was created in New York City. It’s telling that there were racial issues in the City that required attention.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "The Negro Motorist Green Book: 1948"
CT: The Green Book was born and built in New York City by a postal worker named Victor Green. He and his wife, Alma Duke Green, lived in the Sugar Hill district in Harlem. Because of the Harlem Renaissance, most people assume that Harlem was this Black mecca, this safe space. While there were a lot of Black people in Harlem, it was still segregated. Many businesses on 125th Street still had unspoken rules about where you could sit and where you could go. Actually, the Green Books of 1936 and 1937 are just really made up of sites in Harlem and a few in Westchester County.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "The Negro Motorist Green Book: 1948"
New York City has the largest number of sites in the Green Book, with about 1,100 sites out of the 11,000 in the US that I’ve cataloged. They are all over—Midtown, downtown, Brooklyn, Queens, all the boroughs. I live in New York and did some of my original research here at the Schomburg Center, which has the largest collection of Green Books in the world—and they’re digitized.
Courtesy, Candacy Taylor
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "The Negro Motorist Green Book: 1948"
A lot of the locations in the Green Book no longer have signs or a physical presence. Can you visit any of those sites New York City to experience Green Book history?
CT: There are about 50 Green Book businesses in the City still operating. But again, they don’t even usually announce that or recognize their history. A lot of them don’t even know their relationship to the Green Book. So that’s part of the work I look forward to doing with NYC Tourism, to get them to recognize this history and celebrate it and bring it to the forefront.
Courtesy, Candacy Taylor
There are a few remnants. There’s a Hotel Fane sign in Harlem on 135th Street between Lenox and Adam Clayton Powell. Across the street from it is the YMCA that was in the Green Book; Malcolm X stayed here. [You can see] Victor Green’s office where he ran the Green Book. I wrote the text for a marker that’s going up outside his home, at 938 St. Nicholas Ave., in April 2024.
I’m also launching a mobile app, a mobile marker system of Green Book sites, sometime in 2024. It will operate for the whole country, helping people identify these sites and their history.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "The Negro Motorist Green-Book: 1940," The New York Public Library Digital Collection
You have in some ways become the face of the Green Book today.
CT: There were a few things before me. The New York Times did a small piece on Calvin Ramsey. He had written a children’s book called Ruth and the Green Book, but had not done any real research on the guide. There were circles in academia who were doing Green Book projects, but it was really under the radar.
It wasn’t until The Atlantic published the article in 2016 about Route 66 that things really took off. I did a [press] series of around 30 different media publications just trying to get the story out there. And then the Green Book movie came out and won an Oscar, though it had nothing to do with the Green Book really; it was only mentioned a few times. Universal Studios called me and said we need you to explain what the Green Book is because that was the first question people asked after the screening of the film. I kind of became the Green Book person after that.
The Automotive Hall of Fame inducted Victor and Alma Green [in 2022] and it was such a great honor. I get the awards on behalf of Victor and Alma Green, which I will eventually donate to the Smithsonian and others so that they live beyond me.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "The Travelers' Green Book: 1961"
Is there anything else that you want people to understand about the Green Book?
CT: The first edition is mostly garages and auto shops. Then eventually there were drugstores, haberdashers, bike shops. There were all these unusual types of businesses that you wouldn’t expect in a travel guide, but they were there out of necessity.
People try to say the Green Book was like the AAA Guide for Black people, but it was so much more because it really showed how many places Black people were shut out of and needed a resource to where it was safe to do regular things.
Victor Green was a businessman with an opportunity who pushed boundaries, even down to him finding a way to move his printing from Harlem to Midtown, which was unheard of at the time because he couldn’t even get served coffee up the street. That kind of ambition, that kind of entrepreneurship and resilience—that is the Green Book.
