James Baldwin's South, Part 3 The Green-Book
The Negro Motorist Green Book, Circa 1957, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
James Baldwin was an esteemed African American author and activist. Much of his writing focused on racial disparity and intersectionality in the United States of America. Part 3 of this series seeks to inform our readers on the Negro Motorist Green-Book and its usefulness to African Americans during the Jim Crow era.
The Negro Motorist Green-Book was a valuable resource that helped guide black customers to hospitable eateries. African American postal worker Victor H. Green created the Victor H. Green & Company Publishing Company in Harlem, which first published the guide in 1936 and updated the guide every year for three decades. The cover of the guide had the motto, “Carry your Green Book with you—you may need it.” Civil rights leader Julian Bond served as one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He recalls, “My family had a Green Book when I was young and used it to travel in the South to find out where we could stop to eat, where we could spend the night in a hotel or somebody’s home.” In 1949, the book covered all fifty states as well as Bermuda, Mexico, and Canada. The book’s section on New Jersey included long lists of businesses friendly to African American clientele throughout the state, including taverns and restaurants where one could get something to eat. Indicative of the racial climate there, the guide had nothing listed for Princeton. Bond remembers, “It didn’t matter where you went, Jim Crow . . . segregation reached everywhere in the United States, and even though the laws didn’t require it, it was practiced almost everywhere.”
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