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''Keep going'': African Americans on the road in the era of Jim Crow.
Americans loved their automobiles. African Americans in particular embraced their automobiles because every aspect of travel in the era of Jim Crow was circumscribed by race and cars allowed them to avoid the segregation of the Jim Crow railroad car and bus. Buying a car also meant participating in consumer capitalism, the essence of American culture. African Americans expressed middle class American values through car ownership and cars helped to alter the way that people behaved toward one and to change deeply entrenched racial etiquette. Along the highways there was a close relationship between race and the organization of space. As black families and business travelers went out on the road, from the 1930s to the 1960s, they discovered a landscape of public establishments where they were unwelcome or even treated with hostility.;To help navigate the hostile roadside environment a variety of guidebooks assisted African Americans as they traveled in a country still in the throes of segregation. These travel guides provided state-by-state listings of public accommodations---hotels and motels, tourist houses, colored YMCAs, restaurants, movie theaters, doctors, barbershops and beauty parlors and various places of entertainment---that welcomed black patronage. The longest lasting and most successful of the African American travel guides was the Negro Motorist's Green Book, published by Victor and Alma Green in their offices in Harlem. The Green Book appealed to middle class African Americans with its polite and restrained language. Ironically, middle class black travelers believed that travel would promote integration and defeat prejudice, but they were forced to stay in segregated accommodations when they traveled. The Green Book sustained itself for thirty years (1936-1966) by appealing to black middle class travelers and to white liberal supporters. The Standard Oil Corporation sponsored the Green Book and circulated it to their Esso gas station patrons. Travel for African Americans represented a middle class response to discrimination and a way of gaining the rights of citizenship.;Attached is a supplemental file containing a United States map showing the distribution of African American tourist accommodations.
306 pages, NOOKstudy eTextbook
About the author
Gretchen Sorin
7 books23 followersGretchen Sullivan Sorin is distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. She has curated innumerable exhibits―including with the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum and the New York State Historical Association―and lives in upstate New York.
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