Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America

Has the adaptation

Original publication date

2020-01-07

People/Characters

Victor Hugo Green; Frank Schiffman; Orson Welles; Thurgood Marshall; George Grant; John D. Rockefeller (show all 8); Laura Spelman Rockefeller; Langston Hughes

Important places

Harlem, New York, New York, USA; Apollo Theater, Harlem, New York, New York, USA; Sundown Towns

Dedication

For Ron, Mom, Aimee, Adger, Sophie, and Chris

First words

Introduction: "Don't you dare say a word."

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Chapter One: As Ron hurried down the plush carpeted stairs on his way to the garage, carrying a stack of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Howlin' Wolf CDs, he said, "Okay. I'm ready to roll!" I stared at him and shook my head. "It's... (show all) after ten o'clock. Why can't you drive during the day, like a normal person?" His answer was always the same. "Traffic."

Quotations

After scouting more than 3,600 Green Book sites, I realized that most of my well-meaning liberal friends in the coastal cities had never seen the poverty that millions of Americans are living in. By the time I got to Detroit,... (show all) after leaving Los Angeles and driving across the country, I was in tears.

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The sites that are still with us symbolize survival: They endured the times the pendulum swung forward and a wrecking ball swung back. These businesses survived urban renewal, gentrification, and white supremacist policies. A... (show all)nd the people in these communities survived underfunded schools and overfunded prisons. All of this cemented my faith that we would survive Trump.

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Driving too slowly, however, could also attract attention, so to avoid getting pulled over, most black men at the time learned to drive a mile or two under the speed limit. A slower car in front could pose yet another problem... (show all) for black motorists in Jim Crow states, where it was illegal for a black driver to pass a white driver.

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Black Americans who went to mainstream banks for auto financing were generally denied loans, but even after World War II, the roughly 3 percent of black men who received bank credit were often charged higher interest rates th... (show all)an white customers. Moreover, black men living in the South needed a white man to cosign for a loan. (Women of any race were denied credit without a male cosigner until well into the 1970s.)

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In 1930, a few years before Cadillac opened its showroom doors to African Americans, journalist George Schuyler addressed this issue, saying that “Blacks who drove expensive cars offended white sensibilities, and some black... (show all)s kept to older models so as not to give the dangerous impression of being above themselves.”

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The exclusion of black people from golf courses as anything but caddies was commonplace, but in 1943 it was written directly into the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) bylaws that only “members of the Caucasian race”... (show all) were allowed to join. (The clause was finally removed in 1961.)

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George Grant, an African American dentist, made the most significant contribution when he designed the first golf tee, in 1899.

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Twenty-three years after Grant invented his wooden golf tee, Joseph Bartholomew, a native of New Orleans and a self-taught golfer, became the first African American to design a public golf course.... As a black man, he was fo... (show all)rbidden from playing on this course or any of the several he designed in New Orleans and across the state of Louisiana.

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Presenting the illusion of access and then going to great lengths to employ a hidden, covert system to deny it constitutes an even more insidious racism, and one much harder to fight. For this and so many other reasons, the a... (show all)utomobile was powerful for black physical and social mobility.

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It’s likely that Esso’s benevolence for black people had been inspired by Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Esso’s CEO. Spelman Rockefeller, who was white, had been raised in Cleveland, Ohio, i... (show all)n a house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her parents, Harvey Buell Spelman and Lucy Henry Spelman, had been fearless and powerful abolitionists.

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...in the conundrum of segregation being both a blessing and a curse, black-owned businesses especially benefited, largely because in many cases, black people were denied services and shut out of white America.

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In 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi stated on the Senate floor that allowing black men to serve in the armed forces was a mistake that would “inevitably lead to disaster,” because once you “impress the Neg... (show all)ro with the fact that he is defending the flag” and “inflate his untutored soul with military airs,” he would demand that “his political rights must be respected.”

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Rockefeller (the CEO of Esso) was the chairman of the advisory committee at the United Negro College Fund, which he founded in 1944.

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Today, many of the homes that were bought with the help of the GI Bill are worth ten times their purchase price and have provided financial security, retirement, and college tuition for three generations of the same family. B... (show all)lack GIs being denied access to this entitlement program is partially why today the average white American family has nearly ten times the net worth of the average black American family.

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Route 66 tourist shops sell hundreds of products featuring Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Betty Boop, all in an effort to recapture a time that didn’t exist for black travelers, and only rarely for whites. The Ameri... (show all)can ideals associated with Route 66, then and now, have usurped the true narrative, erasing the more harrowing aspects of the road’s past. Today, the Route 66 brand is so weighted with nostalgia that parts of the fabled highway are suffocating under an idealized past that never was.

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The freeway system was tied into “urban renewal” projects that spanned America, which not only took tourism away from Route 66 towns but also decimated black communities. Urban renewal’s effect on black neighborhoods wa... (show all)s even more destructive, as many of the new freeways bisected more black communities than white.

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Freeways created physical and psychological barriers, dividing a nation that was already struggling to find common ground. And although this was a time when the country thought it was moving forward, the pendulum was actually... (show all) swinging backward—and this time, when it did, it literally became a wrecking ball.

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In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, white business owners found that desegregation increased profits by broadening their customer base, and it gave some of them the courage they had needed to do the right thing.

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Once black people could venture into new areas, they did. However, as more black travelers patronized white businesses, black business owners lost the support they had relied on, and many struggled to keep their businesses op... (show all)en. It was a no-win situation.

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In less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, at least half of the Green Book black-owned businesses were closed, either through lack of support or through eminent domain, which allowed federal, state, and ... (show all)city governments to take over the land to expand freeway systems and for urban renewal projects.

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In many respects, Nixon’s “war on drugs” essentially became a war on black communities, the places where Green Book sites once thrived. Apparently, Nixon’s plan worked. Just one decade after the Green Book ceased publ... (show all)ication, the number of Americans incarcerated had doubled. And today it has skyrocketed to 700 percent of what it was in the 1960s.

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Nearly every U.S. president since Nixon designed his own “get tough on crime” initiative, but it was President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill that was the worst. Among other outrageous provisions, it eliminated higher e... (show all)ducation for inmates, authorized the use of boot camps for delinquent minors, and allocated money for new prisons, contributing to the prison-industrial complex we know today.

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Clinton’s Crime Bill kicked the pendulum of justice further back than any failed policies that attempted to address racial equality since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Once we locked up nearly a third of our black me... (show all)n, families dissolved, more black-owned businesses closed, and schools in black neighborhoods started to look more like jails. And once black men were released from jail, they couldn’t go back to their homes because it would be a violation of their parole; those who did go home put the whole family at risk for eviction. Only two years after the Crime Bill was signed, seventeen billion dollars that had been allocated for public housing was being used to build new prisons.

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...“prison gerrymandering” pulls black people out of their communities and places them, at least in the census, into nearly all-white communities. Once these black inmates are counted as residents, the rise in population ... (show all)gives these towns more legislative power in Washington, while simultaneously disempowering the black communities the inmates left when they were incarcerated.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Chapter 11: All black Americans wanted was the ability to walk, run, drive, shop, and live freely outside their neighborhoods, just like white people. After the Hampton House became another casualty to integration, community activist Georgia Ayers summed it up: "We got what we wanted, but lost what we had."

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Epilogue: As the author and educator Jelani Cobb tells his students at Columbia: "History doesn't repeat itself. Humans do."

Blurbers

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Thompson, Heather Ann; Lewis, David Levering; Wilson, William Julius

Original language

English

Canonical DDC/MDS

970.980; 973.049607300904

Canonical LCC

E185.61