Victor H. Green created "The Green Book" to help Black people travel safely from the 1930s through the 1960s.

In 1913, Green began his career as a postal carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in Bergen County, New Jersey. Five years later, he married Alma Duke from Richmond, Virginia. During the Great Migration, Alma moved from the South – like thousands of other Black Americans. Shortly after they married, the couple moved to Harlem in New York City, which was rapidly becoming the center of Black arts and culture – a period now known as “the Harlem Renaissance.”

As African Americans began to increase their ownership of automobiles to travel for business and pleasure, they still were restricted by racial segregation. State laws in the South required separate facilities for African Americans and many motels and restaurants in northern states excluded them too. In an effort to help African Americans avoid humiliation and danger when traveling, Green created what was originally known as “The Negro Motorist Green Book.”

The Green Book was a guide published in 1936 that provided African Americans a list of safe places to eat, sleep and even fuel their cars as they navigated unfamiliar and potentially unsafe parts of the country during the Jim Crow era. The first edition of the Green Book, only 10 pages long, focused on hotels and restaurants in New York City as “Whites Only” policies meant that Black travelers often couldn’t find safe places to eat and sleep, and so-called “Sundown Towns”–municipalities that banned Black Americans after dark – were scattered across the country.

By 1949 the guide included international destinations in Bermuda and Mexico; it listed places for food, lodging, and gas stations. In 1952 Green changed the name to The Negro Travelers' Green Book. Green printed 15,000 copies of The Green Book each year, marketing them to white and Black-owned businesses to demonstrate "the growing affluence of African Americans." Esso franchised gas stations to Blacks at the time, while other companies did not. The Esso stations became popular sales outlets for the book. Similar guides had been published for Jewish travelers in some areas.

Green's guide was so popular that he immediately began to expand its coverage the next year to other US destinations, adding hotels and restaurants. After retiring from the Postal Service, Green continued to work on updating issues of The Green Book.

Victor Green died in 1960 in Manhattan, New York City. After Green died, the publication continued, with his widow Alma serving as editor until 1966. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the legal end to racial segregation in public facilities marked the beginning of the guide's obsolescence, the goal Green had described in his introduction to the first edition of his work.





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