The Green Book, a trip to segregationist America (1/2)

Audio 48:30

American documentary filmmaker Candacy Taylor, author of "Overground Railroad", in front of Clifton's restaurant, a hotspot for the black community in Los Angeles and referenced by the Green Book.

© Katrina Parks

By: Céline Develay Mazurelle Follow

3 mins

On the occasion of the "Black History Month" which is held in France and around the world in February 2022, we invite you to set off on a journey through the pages of the Green Book.

For 30 years, during segregation in America, this travel guide has allowed black citizens and travelers to carve the road too...

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Getting in the car and racing through the great outdoors is one of the founding myths of travel in America.

Except that during segregation, this individual freedom, torn from the road, was not self-evident for blacks, confined, confined to their own country.

Traveling for black citizens was done at their own risk, hardship and fear.

And yet, they hit the road and snatched 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 era 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 s stop along the way, across the country… 

Recently, Hollywood took hold of this guide, an object as crazy and unthinkable as the times it was trying to answer.

However, he 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 is called the black experience, compared to the fairy tale that white America liked to tell itself... 

A radio story in 2 episodes by Céline Develay-Mazurelle and Laure Allary, initially broadcast in April 2021.

With the help of the American documentary filmmaker

 and around the sound archives she collected, as part of a collection for the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

Learn more:

- On 

, published in 2020 in the United States by 

, the result of an immense investigation over nearly 80,000 kilometers and more than 5,000 sites listed by the Green Book, through the United States.

A fascinating and moving book. 

- Candacy Taylor has also carried out valuable work collecting testimonies on the Green Book for 

.

Find it online. 

- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture concentrates different editions of the Green Book, go to the 

website  to browse them in digital version. 

- On the current issue of the mass incarceration of African-Americans, echoing the question of black mobility in the United States, watch 

.

It is available for free online! 

- On the latest book by French historian and Americanist Sylvie Laurent: “

”.

2020. Editions of the House of Human Sciences. 

To extend the trip:

- "

", our 3-episode radio series on the road to civil rights in Alabama and Georgia that put us on the path to the Green Book. 

- "

", another radio series in 3 episodes on the innumerable paths of freedom drawn and trodden by African-Americans during the time of slavery.

The "Negro Motorist Green Book" was described as the bible of the black motorist and traveler under Jim Crow laws.

© Smithsonian/ Scurlock Addison N./ Wikimedia

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• Racism

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