The Route 66 Alliance and Mike McUsic are working on a website to help pass along photos, stories and video about Route 66 sites listed in editions of the Negro Motorist Green Books from 1936 to 1964, plus plenty of other of the usual road-trip material you might find.
The Historypin website is meant to be crowd-sourced so that Route 66 travelers can add their own experiences and media.
Have a look at it. Dozens of entries already are there:
Postal worker Victor H. Green published the annual travel guide to “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable.”
Green’s use of the word of “difficulties” was widely understood as “beatings or worse” in certain parts of the country, including the Route 66 states of Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. During the 1950s, six of eight states on Route 66 enforced some form of legal segregation.
Route 66 fan and author Candacy Taylor is undertaking research on the Green Book for a future book of her own.
The New York Public Library digitized a number of the Green Book editions.
On Monday, during Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, an NPR station also produced a segment about the Negro Motorist Green Book.
You also can map a trip in 1947 or 1956 using the Green Book. You can see my report on using the map along Route 66 here, leading to results I didn’t expect.
(Image of the cover of the 1949 Negro Motorist Green Book)
Thank you for spearheading this effort to bring to the Route 66 Community that for Black folks, it wasn’t as easy to “get your kicks.”
It never struck me that such a book would have been needed. How often was Standard Oil’s “ESSO” turned into “Sod Off!”.