During racial segregation in the Jim Crow era, black travelers often struggled to find hotels, restaurants, and other necessary services. To help them “travel without embarrassment,” New York City postman Victor H. Green created a guidebook for African Americans traveling in 1936.
“The Negro Motorist Green Book,” its pages filled with addresses of businesses accommodating to black travelers, became an invaluable annual guide during its nearly 30 years of publication. Outside of African-American communities, the Green Book was not well known and disappeared from view after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public facilities.
In recent decades, interest in the handbook has renewed, due in part to growing scholarly attention to 20th-century African American history, as well as the 2018 feature film and 2019 documentary of the same name. Original copies of the book are hard to find.
“In the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, where we are trying to document the black experience more comprehensively, this is a really important document for our library.”
Leslie Morris
The Harvard Library acquired a 1949 international edition covering Canada and Mexico in March, said Leslie Morris, Gore-Vidal curator of modern books and manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard’s archive of rare books and manuscripts, literature and the performing arts.
The purchase is part of an effort to diversify the library’s collections, Morris said. When the Houghton Library opened in 1942, a travel guide for black people was not considered a collectible, she said.
“Even though Harvard is the largest university in the world, it collected certain things to support teaching and research, but nobody thought that was important,” Morris said. “But in the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, where we’re trying to document the black experience more thoroughly, this is really an important document for our library. One of our priorities was to diversify the collection and try to address some of the failures of our predecessors.”
Although the New York Public Library has the most complete collection of the Green Book in the country, original copies are rare, Morris said.
Earlier this year, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., a professor at Alphonse Fletcher University and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, alerted Morris to an upcoming auction that would feature a 1949 copy of The Green Book. She placed a bid.
The library purchased the 80-page guide from a Manhattan auctioneer for $50,000 plus buyer’s premium.
“It was worth it,” Morris said.
“‘The Green Book’ was one of those things I didn’t think would come up any time soon,” she said. “We work closely with the faculty and Skip Gates has been a wonderful partner. Not only is he knowledgeable, but everyone knows him. For both teaching purposes and for exhibition purposes, I thought it was important that we have an example of ‘The Green Book’ because it really is a key document of black history.”
The 1949 edition includes a chapter devoted to Massachusetts, listing nearly 50 businesses open to black travelers in Boston.
“‘The Green Book’ was a life-saving guide for black Americans,” said Candacy Taylor, author of “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America” (2020). “It’s an important document of the Jim Crow era: a sort of black yellow pages where people looked for haircuts, medicine, places to stay or restaurants. It also speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit, resilience and courage of black business owners and black travelers who helped shape the culture of this country through their travels.”
The guide is a “symbol of Jim Crow America” and an “astonishing rejection of it, born of ingenuity and the relentless pursuit of freedom,” Gates wrote in his blurb for Taylor’s book, which she worked on in 2017 while a fellow at the Hutchins Center.
The 1949 edition includes a chapter devoted to Massachusetts, listing nearly 50 businesses open to black travelers in Boston, including three hotels, nine restaurants, 21 beauty salons, two barber shops, six tailor shops, and one nightclub—the Savoy at 410 Massachusetts Avenue.
Many of the businesses were located along Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street. They included restaurants such as Loonie Lee’s, Sunnyside and Green Candle, as well as “Tourist Homes,” informal hotels named “Mrs. Williams,” “Julia Walters” and “M. Johnson.”
The book served a clear and necessary purpose in its time, but its editors looked forward to the day when it would no longer be needed.
“Someday the day will come when this guide will no longer need to be published,” they wrote. “Then we will have equal opportunities and privileges as a race in the United States. It will be a great day for us to stop publishing this, for then we will be able to go anywhere we please without embarrassment. But until that time comes, we will continue to publish this information each year for your convenience.”
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