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''The Negro Motorist Green Book'' (at times titled ''The Negro Traveler's Green Book'') was an annual guidebook for African Americans, commonly referred to simply as the ''Green Book''. It was originated and published by New York City mailman Victor H. Green in the United States from 1936 to 1966, during the Jim Crow era, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against non-whites was widespread. Although pervasive racial discrimination and black poverty limited ownership of cars among African Americans, the emerging black middle class became car owners. Green expanded the coverage in his book from the New York area to much of North America, also founding a travel agency. Many blacks took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult."〔Franz, p. 242〕 Black Americans employed as salesmen, entertainers, and athletes also traveled frequently for work purposes. African-American travelers faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences, such as white-owned businesses refusing to serve them or repair their vehicles, being refused accommodation or food by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only "sundown towns". Green founded and published ''The Negro Motorist Green Book'' to tackle such problems, compiling resources "to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable."〔 From a New York-focused first edition published in 1936, Green expanded the work to cover much of North America, including most of the United States and parts of Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean, including Bermuda. The ''Green Book'' became "the bible of black travel during Jim Crow",〔 enabling black travelers to find lodgings, businesses, and gas stations that would serve them along the road. Outside the African-American community, however, it was little known. Shortly after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the types of racial discrimination that had made the ''Green Book'' necessary, publication ceased and it fell into obscurity. Interest in it has revived in the early 21st century in connection with studies of black travel during the Jim Crow era. At least two documentaries about it were in production in 2015. The Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, MI installed a permanent exhibit on the green book in late 2014 that features a 1956 copy of the book guests can review as well as video interviews of those that utilized the book.〔http://www.gilmorecarmuseum.org/visit-explore-2/special-exhibits/〕 A 1941 copy of the book will be displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in 2016. ==Traveling while black: the African American travel experience== Until long after the Civil Rights era (1955–1968), black travelers in the United States faced major problems to which most whites were oblivious. White supremacists had long sought to restrict black mobility. As a result, simply undertaking an auto journey was fraught with difficulty for black people and it was potentially a dangerous undertaking. They were subjected to racial profiling by police departments ("Driving While Black"), faced being punished for being seen as "uppity" or "too prosperous" if they were driving a car (an act that many whites regarded as a white prerogative), and risked harassment or worse on or off the highway.〔Seiler, p. 88〕 In a bitter commentary published in 1947, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, ''The Crisis'', highlighted the uphill struggle blacks faced in undertaking recreational travel: Such restrictions had their origins dating back to colonial times, and were found throughout North America. After the end of legal slavery in the North and then later in the South after the Civil War, most freedmen continued to live at little more than a subsistence level, but a minority of African Americans gained a measure of prosperity. They could plan leisure travel for the first time. Affluent blacks arranged large group excursions for as many as 2,000 people at a time, for instance, traveling by rail from New Orleans to resorts along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In the pre-Jim Crow era this necessarily meant mingling with whites in hotels, transportation and leisure facilities. They were aided in this by the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had made it illegal to discriminate against African Americans in public accommodations and public transportation.〔 They encountered a white backlash, particularly in the South, where by 1877 white Democrats controlled every state government. The Act was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1883, resulting in states and cities passing numerous segregation laws. White governments in the South required even interstate railroads to enforce their segregation laws, despite national legislation requiring equal treatment of passengers. The NAACP mounted a legal challenge; the US Supreme Court ruled in ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' (1896) that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional. In practice, facilities for blacks were generally of lesser quality and underfunded. Blacks faced restrictions and exclusion throughout the United States. Generally if blacks were not barred entirely from facilities, they could use them only at different times from whites or in different places, such as segregated (and usually inferior) areas.〔 In 1917, the black writer W. E. B. Du Bois observed that the impact of "ever-recurring race discrimination" had made it so difficult to travel to any number of destinations, from popular resorts to major cities, that it was now "a puzzling query as to what to do with vacations". It was a problem that came to affect an increasing number of black people in the first decades of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of southern African Americans migrated from farms in the south to factories and domestic service in the north. No longer confined to living at a subsistence level, many gained enough disposable income and time to engage in leisure travel.〔 The development of affordable mass-produced automobiles liberated black Americans from having to rely on the "Jim Crow cars" – smoky, battered and uncomfortable railroad carriages which were the separate but decidedly unequal alternatives to more salubrious whites-only carriages. As one black magazine writer commented in 1933, in an automobile "it's mighty good to be the skipper for a change, and pilot our craft whither and where we will. We feel like Vikings. What if our craft is blunt of nose and limited of power and our sea is macademized; it's good for the spirit to just give the old railroad Jim Crow the laugh."〔 Middle-class blacks throughout the United States "were not at all sure how to behave or how whites would behave toward them", as Bart Landry puts it.〔Landry, p. 58〕 In Cincinnati, Ohio, the African-American newspaper editor Wendell Dabney wrote of the situation in the 1920s that "hotels, restaurants, eating and drinking places, almost universally are closed to all people in whom the least tincture of colored blood can be detected."〔 Areas without significant black populations outside the South often refused to accommodate them: not one hotel or other accommodation was open to blacks in Salt Lake City, Utah in the 1920s. Black travelers were stranded if they had to stop there overnight.〔 Only six percent of the more than 100 motels that lined U.S. Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, admitted black customers.〔 Across the whole state of New Hampshire, only three motels in 1956 served African Americans.〔Rugh, p. 77〕 George Schuyler reported in 1943, "Many colored families have motored all across the United States without being able to secure overnight accommodations at a single tourist camp or hotel." He suggested that black Americans would find it easier to travel abroad than in their own country.〔 In Chicago in 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace A. Cayton reported that "the city's hotel managers, by general agreement, do not sanction the use of hotel facilities by Negroes, particularly sleeping accommodations."〔Drake & Cayton, p. 107〕 One incident reported by Drake and Cayton illustrated the discriminatory treatment meted out even to blacks within racially mixed groups: While automobiles made it much easier for black Americans to be independently mobile, the difficulties they faced in traveling were such that, as Lester B. Granger of the National Urban League puts it, "so far as travel is concerned, Negroes are America's last pioneers."〔Seiler, p. 87〕 Black travelers often had to carry buckets or portable toilets in the trunks of their cars because they were usually barred from bathrooms and rest areas in service stations and roadside stops. Travel essentials such as gasoline were difficult to purchase because of discrimination at gas stations. To avoid such problems on long trips, African Americans often packed meals and carried containers of gasoline in their cars. One black motorist observed in the early 1940s that while black travelers felt free in the mornings, by the early afternoon a "small cloud" had appeared. By the late afternoon, "it casts a shadow of apprehension on our hearts and sours us a little. 'Where,' it asks us, 'will you stay tonight?'".〔 They often had to spend hours in the evening trying to find somewhere to stay, sometimes resorting to sleeping in haylofts or in their own cars if they could not find anywhere. One alternative, if it was available, was to arrange in advance to sleep at the homes of black friends in towns or cities along their route. However, this meant detours and an abandonment of the spontaneity that for many was a key attraction of motoring.〔 The civil rights leader John Lewis has recalled how his family prepared for a trip in 1951: Finding accommodation was one of the greatest challenges faced by black travelers. Not only did many hotels, motels, and boarding houses refuse to serve black customers, but thousands of towns across the United States declared themselves "sundown towns," which all non-whites had to leave by sunset.〔 Huge numbers of towns across the country were effectively off-limits to African Americans. By the end of the 1960s, there were at least 10,000 sundown towns across the U.S. – including large suburbs such as Glendale, California (population 60,000 at the time); Levittown, New York (80,000); and Warren, Michigan (180,000). Over half the incorporated communities in Illinois were sundown towns. The unofficial slogan of Anna, Illinois, which had violently expelled its African-American population in 1909, was "Ain't No Niggers Allowed".〔Loewen, pp. 15–16〕 Even in towns which did not exclude overnight stays by blacks, accommodations were often very limited. African-American travelers faced real physical risks because of the widely differing rules of segregation that existed from place to place, and the possibility of extra-judicial violence against them. Activities that were accepted in one place could provoke violence a few miles down the road. Transgressing formal or unwritten racial codes, even inadvertently, could put travelers in considerable danger.〔Trembanis, p. 49〕 Even driving etiquette was affected by racism; in the Mississippi Delta region, local custom prohibited blacks from overtaking whites, to prevent their raising dust from the unpaved roads to cover white-owned cars.〔 Racist local laws, discriminatory social codes, segregated commercial facilities, racial profiling by police, and sundown towns made road journeys a minefield of constant uncertainty and risk. Road trip narratives by blacks reflected their unease and the dangers they faced, presenting a more complex outlook from those written by whites extolling the joys of the road. The black journalist Courtland Milloy recalls the menacing environment that he encountered during his childhood, in which he learned of "so many black travelers ... just not making it to their destinations."〔Seiler, p. 83〕 K. A. Gbedemah, the finance minister of newly independent Ghana, confronted such racial discrimination in October 1957. He was refused service at a Howard Johnson's restaurant at Dover, Delaware while travelling to Washington, D.C., even after identifying himself by his state position to the restaurant staff.〔Seiler, p. 84〕 The snub caused an international incident, to which an embarrassed President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by inviting Gbedemah to breakfast at the White House.〔DeCaro, p. 124〕 John A. Williams wrote in his 1965 book, ''This Is My Country Too'', that he did not believe "white travelers have any idea of how much nerve and courage it requires for a Negro to drive coast to coast in America." He achieved it with "nerve, courage, and a great deal of luck," supplemented by "a rifle and shotgun, a road atlas, and ''Travelguide'', a listing of places in America where Negroes can stay without being embarrassed, insulted, or worse."〔 He noted that black drivers needed to be particularly cautious in the South, where they were advised to wear a chauffeur's cap or have one visible on the front seat and pretend they were delivering a car for a white person. Along the way, he had to endure a stream of "insults of clerks, bellboys, attendants, cops, and strangers in passing cars."〔 There was a constant need to keep his mind on the danger he faced; as he was well aware, "() people have a way of disappearing on the road."〔Primeau, p. 117〕 Even after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s, black travelers encountered difficulties in some areas. Eddy L. Harris's memoir, ''Mississippi Solo'', an account of his 1988 motorcycle journey alongside the entire length of the Mississippi River, describes how he was "glared at, threatened, turned away, called names, and made afraid."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Negro Motorist Green Book」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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