The Negro Motorist Green Book Exhibition: March 19 – June 12, 2022

The Negro Motorist Green Book exhibition opens this Saturday, March 19, at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. This immersive, multimedia exhibit was curated by Candacy Taylor, former Harvard fellow and celebrated Green Book scholar, for the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service. The Green Book was published between 1936 and 1966 and became the bible of Black travel during the Jim Crow era, a time when racial segregation was legally enforced in the South, and discrimination was rife in the North and West as well.

This was also the age when the automobile became increasingly important in American life as a symbol of freedom and recreation. But for Black motorists, the experience of the open road was far less free than for whites. Travel for Black people was difficult, undignified, and dangerous. Black travelers were denied service at hotels and motels, at restaurants, at gas stations, and struggled to find places to simply use the restroom, or worse, faced intimidation and violence in “sundown towns.”

The Green Book was created by Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem postal worker and entrepreneur, to help Black travelers and vacationers find businesses that would welcome them. According to one memoirist, “You literally didn’t dare leave home without it.”

In many places where there were no hotels or restaurants serving Black customers, Black entrepreneurs, many of them women, ran tourist homes by renting out rooms in their private residences and serving homemade meals. The Green Book demonstrates the creative response the Black business community had to the problems of segregation, discrimination, and violence in travel, and provides important documentary evidence of Black businesses and neighborhoods.

Exhibition curator Candacy Taylor began traveling the country in 2013, photographing and documenting what is left of Green Book sites. She has cataloged over 10,000 sites, and scouted over 6,000. She tells their stories in her book Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America. She has also published an adapted version for young readers.

If you would like to learn more about the Green Book and its history, history librarians at The Seattle Public Library created this resource list for further reading with our partners at the Black Heritage Society of Washington State.

The Green Book in Seattle

The Green Book’s inaugural 1936 edition covered only New York, but the guide quickly grew to expand coverage south and west in subsequent years. With the 1939 edition, the Green Book began including states west of the Mississippi. That year the first Seattle business appeared–the Golden West Hotel at 416 7th Ave S. It was the only one. By 1947 the Seattle listings had significantly increased, as both the Black population of Seattle boomed during and after the WWII, which brought many Black workers west for wartime jobs, and the popularity of the Green Book attracted more business to advertise within it.

If you are looking for an interactive way to explore Seattle’s historical Green Book sites, check out Black & Tan Hall’s new free app-based Seattle Self-Guided Green Book Tour, which explores sites along Jackson Street, the locus of Seattle’s jazz scene, between the 1920s and the 1960s. You can download the app  here.

Black Heritage Society of Washington co-founder Jacqueline E. A. Lawson also created a walking tour of historical Black businesses and cultural sites in Seattle’s Central Area in her book Let’s Take a Walk! A Tour of Seattle’s Central Area as It Was Then (1920s, 1930s, and 1940s). Her tour is based on her deep knowledge of the Central Area, and includes many additional sites not listed in the Green Book. Lawson’s book is available in print from the link above and digital format in SPL’s Special Collections Online. It is highly recommended reading. A young Lawson is pictured below with her mother in 1934.

Below is a list of additional community programs and events organized by the Black Heritage Society of Washington State to support the Negro Motorist Green Book exhibition.

• • Opening Night and Film Screening with Yoruba Richen at the Washington State History Museum
    Featuring the documentary The Green Book: Guide to Freedom and an opportunity to meet acclaimed director Yoruba Richen on March 19. See the film screening, hear from Richen, and be among the first to explore the exhibition. Seating is limited, book today!

• • Meet leading Green Book scholar and author Candacy Taylor on May 19.
    Her book Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America formed the basis for the Smithsonian exhibition that is on view at the Washington State History Museum. Candacy Taylor will be on-site at the History Museum for an author talk along with a book signing. The program will begin with members of Seattle’s African American Writers Alliance reading their original poems and responses inspired by passages in Taylor’s Overground Railroad. 

• • Traveling While Black Hosted Bus Trip, Lunch, and Exhibition.
    Join the Black Heritage Society for a road trip adventure. Ride round trip from Seattle to Tacoma with special guests Anthony and Marlie Love of Traveling While Black in Seattle fame. The King County Metro Transit Black Lives Matter bus takes you to the History Museum in Tacoma where the Historical Society’s director, Jennifer Kilmer, will welcome you. Hear from the museum’s lead curator, Gwen Whiting, about Washington State’s Green Book sites while you enjoy a boxed lunch. Then take a self-guided tour of the Smithsonian’s exhibition The Negro Motorist Green Book. Limited to 30 passengers, book your tickets today!

• • Online Story Time with the Northwest African American Museum.
    Join an interactive online Story Time with guest readers from the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM). Participants will read along with the story Ruth and The Green Book, written by playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey with poet Gwen Strauss. This beautifully illustrated story set in the 1950s is told through a child’s viewpoint to understand the historical importance of the Green Book and how it helped African Americans travel safely across the nation.

• • “Don’t Forget Your Lunch” crafting activity and Green Book history at Wa Na Wari.
    Head over to Wa Na Wari and make your own lunch container while you learn about the history of the Green Book! Wa Na Wari’s artist in residence Perri Rhoden leads you through making an embellished shoebox lunch container. Take away knowledge of a time when African Americans packed lunches and coolers of food to take along on their travels from state to state by car, bus, or train.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was created by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with Candacy Taylor, and made possible through the generous support of Exxon Mobil Corporation. This exhibition has been locally supported by ArtsFund, Humanities Washington, and KNKX Public Radio. Public programming for the exhibition is supported by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

~posted by Heather