The “Green Book”, a journey through segregationist America (Episode 1)
Audio 48:30
The American documentary filmmaker Candacy Taylor, author of "Overground Railroad", in front of the restaurant Clifton's, a high place of the black community in Los Angeles and referenced by the Green Book.
© Katrina Parks
By: Céline Develay Mazurelle
52 mins
Taking the car and spinning through the great outdoors is one of the founding myths of travel to America.
Except that during segregation, this individual freedom, torn from the road, did not go without saying for blacks, confined, confined in their own country.
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Traveling for black citizens was then done at their peril, in hardship and fear.
And yet, they hit the road and wrested that freedom, with the help of an amazing little green book: the Green Book.
Both a travel and survival guide for African-Americans in the days of racial segregation, this guide, created in 1936 by Victor H. Green, a postman from Harlem, set out to list the safe places where they could go. 'stop on the way, across the country ...
Recently, Hollywood grabbed hold of this guide, something as crazy and unthinkable as the days it was trying to answer.
However, it is still little known in the United States and even more so in Europe.
Published for 30 years, the “Negro Motorist Green Book” tells above all about the ingenuity, resilience and incredible vitality of the black community, despite adversity and Jim Crow laws.
What we call the black experience, compared to the fairy tale that white America loved to tell itself ...
A radio story in 2 episodes by Céline Develay-Mazurelle and Laure Allary.
With the help of American documentary filmmaker
Candacy Taylor
and around the sound archives she has collected, as part of a collection for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Find out more:
- On
Candacy Taylor and her book “
Overground Railroad”
, published in 2020 in the United States by
Editions Abrams
, the result of an immense investigation over nearly 80,000 kilometers and more than 5,000 sites listed by the Green Book, through United States.
A fascinating and moving book.
- Candacy Taylor has also done valuable Green Book testimonial work for
the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress
.
To discover online.
- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture concentrates different editions of the Green Book, go to the
New York Public Library website
to browse them in digital version.
- On the current issue of the mass imprisonment of African-Americans, echoing the issue of black mobility in the United States, watch
the documentary “13th” by Ava Duvernay
.
It is available for free online!
To extend the trip:
- "
Black American Dream
", our radio series in 3 episodes on the road to civil rights in Alabama and Georgia which put us on the road to the Green Book.
- "
The Underground Railroad in Canada
", another radio series in 3 episodes on the countless freedom roads designed and trodden by African-Americans in the time of slavery.
The “Negro Motorist Green Book” was described as the bible of the black motorist and traveler under the Jim Crow laws.
© Smithsonian / Scurlock Addison N. / Wikimedia
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