Black travelers in the USA have often faced hardships from racist assholes, such as businesses refusing to serve them or repair their vehicles, being refused accommodation or food by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only "sundown towns".
In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a New York City mailman and World War I veteran, originated and published the first annual volume of The Negro Motorist Green Book, later renamed The Negro Travelers' Green Book, an annual guidebook for black travelers to avoid open and often legal discrimination, compiling resources "to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable."
(Read digital copies from the New York Library https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=about or PDF http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/87_135_1736_GreenBk.pdf )
Although pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging black middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could, to avoid segregation on public transportation but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest.
In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to blacks, eventually expanding its coverage from the New York area to much of North America, as well as founding a travel agency.'
The custom Google Map below compiles placemarks for over 1500 listings from the Spring 1956 Green Book.
Green offered a reward of one dollar for each accepted recommendation, which he increased to five dollars by 1941. He also obtained information from colleagues in the US Postal Service, who would "ask around on their routes" to find suitable public accommodations. The Postal Service was (and is) one of the largest employers of blacks, and its employees were ideally situated to inform Green of which places were safe and hospitable to black travelers.
The 1949 edition included a quote from Mark Twain: "Travel is fatal to prejudice", inverting Twain's original meaning.
Many black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult." Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes.
Repeated and sometimes violent incidents of discrimination directed against diplomats from countries in Africa, particularly on U.S. Route 40 between New York and Washington, D.C., led to the administration of President John F. Kennedy setting up a Special Protocol Service Section within the State Department to assist black diplomats traveling and living within the United States.
The Green Book attracted sponsorship from a number of businesses, including black newspapers in Ohio and Kentucky. Standard Oil (later Esso) was also a sponsor, owing to the efforts of James "Billboard" Jackson, a pioneering black Esso sales representative. Esso's "race group", part of its marketing division, promoted the Green Book as enabling Esso's black customers to "go further with less anxiety". By contrast, Shell gas stations were known to refuse black customers.
While the Green Book was intended to make life easier for those living in racist areas, its publisher looked forward to a time when such guidebooks would no longer be necessary. As Green wrote, "there will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go as we please, and without embarrassment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/history-green-book-african-american-travelers-180958506/
http://mappingthegreenbook.tumblr.com/
Thanks Gary!
so now people do not have the freedom of association and have to put up with customers they don't want.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, you have things backwards and if you dealt with "african americans" a lot you'd quickly see how backwards you are.
Question: why doesn't the law stop black colleges and business from discriminating against whites and asians?
Well, Wolfgang... let me start with the black college thing... from what I remember, they are allowed to be segregated, just like women's colleges, because of the recent and long standing racist and sexist discrimination they've had to ENDURE. Maybe you're familiar with the not so distant past when blacks had to put up with racist whites, and couldn't use the same schools, toilets, sinks, bathrooms, water fountains, and entrances to buildings. They could not get jobs due to strict hiring by racist people.
DeleteI'm pretty sure you're familiar with all that. You may not agree with the desegregation.
But, because of the long understood behavior of people, and how intolerant we are of other people who don't look, or act, or sound, the same... in the USA after our atrocious behavior to people of different countries, they get to exclude those who've raped, beaten, hanged, tortured, infected, and burned them alive. Maybe if those things were not in the recent past, you'd have a reason to wonder why the victims get to exclude the offenders. If all that stuff was thousands of years ago, or maybe even hundreds of years ago, like the Irish slaves, you'd be ok to have completely forgotten it ever happened.
If nothing like that has ever happened to your family, and I hope it never has and never will, you might not understand what people a couple generations away from being victims feel like when dealing with the types of people that were offenders.
Say, have you ever felt some animosity toward Japanese for bombing Pearl Harbor? It's like that. When Americans still hold a grudge for the Pearl Harbor bombing, and refuse to be civil to Japanese in Hawaii, or at the Arizona memorial. I was stationed in Pearl Harbor, on the vary piers that were bombed and shot up on Dec 7th, 1941. Only I was there 50 years to the day later, and it was eerie.
Anyway, you might allow for a zero admission policy that keeps Japanese people off the Arizona memorial, due to them sinking it, and killing thousands, and not wanting to have a single Jap foot trod over their underwater grave. Right?
That's why the blacks get to have colleges that won't allow whites to be students, teachers, faculty, etc. I bet if you wanted to, you could donate money to those schools, though, and they'd like you enough to write a thanks! But, no, whites aren't going to get to go to school there, or be on their basketball team.
Maybe you're aware that in the USA, there are still clubs, groups, businesses, etc that won't allow women? Jews, Blacks, Asians, etc etc any minority at all, to join, enter, buy, sell, or do business there? Yup. And, maybe you're aware that inside the borders of the USA, there are still indian reservations?
Lots of racist shit is still going on, all the time. Whites are still the oppressors, the gringos, the howlies, etc.
DeleteIf you feel discriminated against, I think I can guess why. It's in the first sentence you wrote " have to put up with customers they don't want "
Yeah, that's got something to do with the laws of this country, and the agreement a business agrees to, signs to, and will be prosecuted by, when getting a business license.
Voluntarily accepting the terms and conditions of that business license means being responsible to take the consequences of not conducting the business according to the state, county, and city laws about doing business. I bet one of those is that "customers they don't want" have to be "put up with".
So, let me know, after reading what my thoughts are, just what do I have backwards?
If you knew me, you'd likely never have said a word of what you wrote, except for the quotation marks of derision and scorn around the term african americans. I'm offended by that bullshit, as an american, not as a white american. My sense of what it is to denigrate the term american looks at hyphenating the word American, as an insult, and dilution, and perhaps even contradiction.
Either a person considers themselves to be American, or, they would rather be in some other country.
Now, since very few people are here against their choice, and very few are still slaves... though, you probably don't realize, there still are slaves here, and haven't ever heard of Lola, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/ I can't agree with the foreign country mentality. Waving a rican flag, or Mexican flag, in the USA, and talking trash about the USA, but refusing to go live in the country of that flag you're waving? Is offensive to me.
So, that's about all I can agree with in your note.
I don't have to "deal with" anyone. I either like, or dislike, people because they are assholes, offensive, irritating, deluded, religious, political, or whatever... but, I get to walk away, avoid them, ignore them, give them the silent treatment, or not work with them, near them, or around them.
I've got friends whose ancestors come from everywhere else on this planet. Native americans, Finnish, Romanian, African, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Phillpeano (fuck if I know how to spell that) Guamanian, and so on.
It's not where people are from that matters, it's only what they behave like around me. Some people aren't going to get along with me because I AM the asshole, and others, because THEY are the asshole.
I've kissed women from several countries, and lots of different backgrounds. Not a single bit of difference. I liked them all.
A quick note on the so-called "black colleges", the 101 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) exist only because public and private universities in the south simply did not admit black students, no matter how well qualified. HBCUs never discriminated against white (or any other race) students, admissions is (and always has been) open to all. Many faculty members are non-black, and there has always been a significant minority of non-black students (including white).
ReplyDeleteI'm African American and grew up in the late 50s and 60s, both of my parents were college educated. Father a Navy veteran who spent the last months of the war in the Pacific as a Electronic Technicians Mate, a position only open to him as a result of the Navy finally being forced to desegregate in '44. I remember the crap we had to put up with while visiting relatives just south of the line (in Virginia!) during the early 60s (black family in a new foreign MG sedan with northern plates, deputy bait).
Thanks for clarifying Marc... I'm simply too far removed from colleges and universities, and the East - South East to know much about the admissions policy, but I sure have my mind made up about supporting them regardless of what direction they go with admissions and employment. Open, limited, whatever.
DeleteOther than that, how'd I do with my reply, and initial post?
Jesse, you did good and the hour you spent writing it was well spent even if only one person rethinks his or her attitude and views. I spent 3 days in Tallahassee last week with Equality Florida's Lobby Days trying to spread the same message in favor of the LGBT community. On Friday, I had a long conversation with a man who felt tRump was wonderful. Many of the points I used as comparisons were exactly what you wrote to.
ReplyDeleteI do know we made progress in Tallahassee and by the end of my conversation on Friday, the gentleman admitted he'd never looked at things that way. At 89 years old, he was still willing to evolve and reconsider his views. People can change when their beliefs are challenged with facts.
thank you, and good for you! Bigotry fails when faced with tempered compassion and a bit of friendship.
DeleteYou tell 'em Jesse.
ReplyDeleteA quote from Bulworth.
ReplyDeleteAll we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color.