Green Books and Great Migrations

American Psychogeography V

Roads in America have long symbolized the ideal of freedom. Just like the pilgrims who came here to escape religious persecution, and the pioneers who wanted to homestead their own way in life, the idea of traveling down the road to get away from one place and go to elsewhere, the notion of liberty has always traveled along with the people who take to the roads to find their way.

When the roads became paved, and when you could travel down them with speed, it added the idea of velocity to the metaphor of freedom. If you could afford a car, anyway. When cars first appeared, motoring was a novelty for the wealthy. Cars also became one of the epitomes of the Faustian machine age, rearing generations of motorheads into states of enraptured ecstasy by the spell of purring engines, enervating sensitive types with the cacophonous noise of their splutter.

As the antihuman forces of front line assembly systems riveted the steel beasts into ascendance, the price dropped to the point to where they came into the purview of the middle class, but not all the middle class. First it was just the white middle class. The oil fields had been tapped and gasoline was flowing, cheap and plentiful for a time. People looked to the car as another means of escaping enforced limitations, and eventually African-American’s of the middle class could also afford cars. Yet even when African Americans could start taking to the road in combustible vehicles, the road wasn’t always a safe place to be, especially in the years of Jim Crow.

After the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow was in effect in the Southern states. It was legal for Americans to be segregated by their race and the full power of the law was behind that segregation. Rules, regulations, and systemic racism had the net effect of ensnaring Black people in nets of harassment, and much worse. Human rights were denied and access to what the rest of the country thought as basic was curtailed through severe prejudice.

Yet the road still called, it beckoned as place to roam, out of the drought of oppression and into a world of verdant green where life could be enjoyed.

A man named Victor Hugo Green helped his fellow African American’s get on the road and find hospitable places, people and businesses. Green was a New Yorker through and through, born in 1892. His parents named him after the famous French author whose work championed the outcast, the poor, and the dispossessed. He was the eldest son of William H. Green and Alice (Holmes) and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey with his two siblings. In 1913 he started working as a postman in New Jersey, but became a worldly entrepreneur, though he remained with the postal service for his entire career, even after becoming a publisher during the Harlem Renaissance where was a participant and witness the proliferation and blossoming of Black culture.

GREAT MIGRATION’S AND THE FEAR OF THE RED

The Great Migration was great because it was one of the largest movements of people finding new places to live in the recorded and remembered history of North America. Jim Crow was in effect, and it was the driver for the approximately six million Black people who left the American South for the North, the Midwest and the West. Though the boundaries of time are fuzzy, the Great Migration lasted from about 1910 until the 1970s. Even in places where segregation laws did not exist, segregation by custom was ubiquitous. Even as the laws changed during the Civil Rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legacy and aftereffects have continued to ripple through time, and the social and economic factors driving the movement of African Americans across the country continued.

Looking at it now, the Great Migration can be seen as having had two distinct phases. As with so much else in the United States and the world, the upheaval unleased by World War I and II mark the period of the two phases. The first phase happened roughly between 1910 and 1940. In this time period Black southerners made their way to Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York. A war always needs a body, and for this, able bodied men were sent off to be machine gun fodder in the trenches as the efforts to fight were escalated in 1917 and people got sent off to Europe. With industrial jobs vacant by those who’d gone off to kill and get killed, jobs opened up for African Americans to fill those spots.

Americas internal migrants had found better jobs after fleeing from a South mired under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid, but other difficulties awaited. Injustice and prejudice wasn’t confined to one part of the continent and country. It is estimated that around 2 million Blacks left the south during the first phase from World War I to World War II. The social shake up to the norms wasn’t easy for people who felt their privileges were being infringed upon. The perceived threat of Communism was another cloud hanging over the minds and livelihoods of capitalist businessmen who were fine with the way things were.

The Russian Revolution was on everyone’s mind, erupting into paranoia. Politicians, government workers, and capitalists especially feared an imminent commie uprising. African-American commies they were even more afraid of; Black people were already advocating racial equality. Throwing in labor rights made the situation feel even more threatening for those with vested interests in the same-old, same-old.
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In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” This was the opening statement of fear that exploded in yet another wave of white violence against African Americans who had relocated in the search of making a living and a better life, in the search for just a small slice of the American dream. The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots explode across the land starting in the April, from Georgia to Maine, to South Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Arizona. Four days of mob violence formed an early peak in Washington D.C. in July, followed by more mob attacks in Norfolk, Virginia on Black veterans coming home from the war.

The Chicago riots of late July into August marked another peak. Hundreds of Black homes and businesses on the South Side of the Windy City were destroyed in the riots that followed the cruel drowning of Eugene Williams, guilty only of swimming in the wrong place. More rioting happened in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the end of September and into November of the year a massacre occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, sparked by fears of socialism as sharecroppers began the work of getting organized into a union.

Charles Hillman Brough, the governor of Arkansas, appointed a Committee of Seven, made up of good old boy businessmen to investigate the business of the Sharecropper’s Union. They came to the conclusion that it was a socialist enterprise made “for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people.” Articles about this in the newspapers stoked the flames of hatred and agitation, leading directly to further violence. All of it amounted to an anti-Black pogrom with a hefty dose of anti-communist Red Scare mixed in to whip up people into an irrational frenzy of bloodlust and belligerence.

The second phase of began as World War II brought the war industry (called elsewhere the “defense industry”) into expansion. This continued on into the 1970’s when America’s loss of morale in Vietnam put a cap on the number of jobs for war related manufacturing. In this time frame African Americans continued to move North, and further west into the major cities of California and up into the big cities of the Pacific Northwest. In just twenty odd years after World War II another 3 million Black people had migrated to these and various other points in the United States.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights era had ended Jim Crow but redlining and other systemic forms of racism were still in operation, along with usual overt kind. Neighborhoods might not have been segregated by clear and visible laws, but discrimination in housing and restrictive covenants kept many disparities in place across the United States. These scars on the collective landscape continue to reveal layers of psychohistory, and the effect of this psychogeography on the people who dwell in each area continues to be felt.

It was in this time period of the Great Migration that Victor Hugo Green’s travel book offered a roadmap for navigating such a harshly stratified society.

IN THE HARLEM GREEN

Harlem was one of the hot spot destinations of choice in the early phases of the Great Migration. Alma S. Duke had come up from Richmond, Virginia as part of that movement of people. In general, people moving up from Virginia often went to Harlem and New York City, while people moving away from Mississippi often went to Chicago. People were moving away from plenty of other places in the South as well, and there was variation, but these were two of the prevalent patterns. Alma was one who had come up from Virginia.

In 1917 she married Victor Hugo Green. The happy couple moved to Harlem to be in the happening place. They settled in the Sugar Hill community. They made it just in time for the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American music, theater, painting and visual art, and of course, literature, was going through an incredible fertile period as artists took back “the Negro” from the stereotypical tropes of whites. An identity and consciousness apart from middle class bourgeois values of the white Victorian era was crafted. The Victorian reality tunnel looked out on the world through colonialist, imperialist and racist belief systems. This renaissance of artistic activity was happening in other parts of the U.S., but the main concentration of energy was in Harlem.

At the same time as Blacks were making Harlem a hotspot of American cultural life, some were also getting on the road as people entered the middle class and had the ability and opportunity to afford a set of wheels. But the road can be harsh, and even motoring along, there were many gas stations that wouldn’t fill a tank, mechanics who wouldn’t work on a Black owned car, places that wouldn’t serve African Americans a meal. This treatment wasn’t limited to the South, as the events of the Red Summer showed (and many other events afterwards). Northerners were just as cruel and racist. It made staying put in a safe place with known elements less risky than traveling the country to visit family, especially when traversing places where White Supremacist groups were active.
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Yet it wasn’t all hatred. African Americans businesses were also springing up, and gradually there were businesses where acceptance of everyone’s humanity was the key. Green had the idea that he could list such places in a book to help Black people get around the country and enjoy the freedom of traveling, the freedom of being free. The result was “The Negro Motorists Green Book.”

He first published his guide in 1936. The first edition was only ten pages and focused on New York City. The prevalence of “Whites Only” restaurants and “Sundown Towns” -places where African Americans weren’t welcome after dark- meant that going somewhere new was a dangerous business when violence and hostility could be expected. With a list of places where it was safe to go, new possibilities for real freedom opened up, and Green’s book came into high demand. He continued to publish new edition each year, expanding the range of cities and towns covered with each new version.

His job at the postal office was a key to this enterprise as he was able to use it for networking with other postmen and connect with Black business people along their mail routes. Once contact was made, he asked them if they’d like to advertise in the Green Book. These same businesses listed in the book then became venues where the book itself could be sold and bought. It was an underground or parallel system operating outside of the mainstream. With the book in hand African American citizens had another way of making and forming connections to people offering needed services, of finding dance halls, cafes, shops and other places that were safe. Places to just chill out and relax.

All of this nurtured community and the networking was one of the things that helped set a stage for growth of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in turn depended on financial independence. The Black businesses that made up the book were the foundation of success.

Of the many African Americans who used the Green Book, many did so for the purpose of earning a living. Salespeople, traveling musicians, entertainers, athletes and others who had to take to the road for work in one capacity or another were among those whose lives were made easier through the travel guide. Blacks in the middle class and above working as trained professionals in fields such as medicine, law, insurance and engineering were also looking to spend some of their income and treat their families to leisure time. Relaxation and recreation at the standard resorts was often barred from Blacks due to segregation, so as new options and opportunities became available, these got listed in the guide. Idlewild in Michigan was one of the leading resorts during the Jim Crow era and it had reached the height of its popularity by the 1960s.  

Off the back of the Green Book, Green started another enterprise in 1947. This was a Vacation Reservation Service and travel-agency, again specializing in Black owned businesses. By the end of the 1940s, his guide had gone outside the confines of the U.S., showing how to get around in places like Mexico and Bermuda. He did all this while still maintaining his day job, from which he retired in 1952. That was the same year he changed the name of his publication to the Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It wasn’t just about motoring anymore, but about experiencing life out in the world and all it had to offer.

HAVE OIL, WILL TRAVEL

Without gasoline and oil, a car is just a heap of metal and parts. These days it might just be fiberglass, metal and parts. Without a place to fill up, getting on the road means nothing. Without oil and petroleum products the American conception of roads and cars as the keys to freedom would be a dream. During the time period of the Great Migration, Shell stations had been known to refuse Black customer’s service. Not so with Esso Standard Oil, a company who became another key to the continued success of the Green Book. They had enlightened policies, and franchised gas stations to African Americans.

These days the company that was Esso is better known as ExxonMobil. The name “Esso” came from the way a person would say the letters S and O, for Standard Oil, the immediate predecessor of the company. Strange how these corporations live longer than humans, but with genealogies just as tangled.

Standard Oil was based in New Jersey and had started marketing products under the Esso brand in 1926. During those Jim Crow years, they hired Black intellectuals in a time when African Americans with higher education and training under their belt had a difficult time finding employment. In 1934 one of the people they hired was James Albert “Billboard” Jackson. He wrote a column called Jackson’s Page for Billboard, the famous music and entertainment magazine, where he wrote about Black performers in New York, Chicago, and other big cities. His column was very popular and Black newspapers in the North syndicated his work under the byline “Billboard” Jackson.

Writing about music and cultural life in the 1920s put him into direct contact with many of the greats from the Harlem Renaissance, and his work as a critic was crucial in getting their work out to a wider audience. Like Green, he was another pioneer in Black business and entrepreneurship: he was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce on that very subject between 1927 and 1933. In 1934 he was asked to come and work for Esso Standard Oil Company in the role of public relations and marketing specialist, the first African American to hold that role. He also became the first African American member of the American Marketing Association in in 1940. All in all, he had worked for Esso for twenty-one years. Jackson was very active in African American fraternal groups and business associations, and was a member of some thirty-seven different voluntary groups. He had developed quite the network of influence.

While Jackson was working at Esso in the marketing division, he convinced the company to sponsor the Green Book so their Black customers could “go further with less anxiety.” By the 1940’s a little less than half of all Esso dealers were Black making this coordination effort a natural fit. 

The 1949 edition of the Green Book included the following Esso endorsement message:

“As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign.”

Alma Green, who had worked on the Green Book as an editor at various times continued publishing the book after her husband died on October 16, 1960. She continued to serve and publish as an editor until 1966, the last year the annual book was published.

When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 it marked the end of legal racial segregation. Sundown towns may have been blocked legally, but racial profiling by local police and sheriff's departments, harassment by everyday racists, and other aggravations continued and continue. Driving while Black remains dangerous. The influence of that reality has left a deep mark on the psychology of collective America, and the memory of that is permeated across the land.
 
RE/SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin

​Overground railroad: the Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America by Candacy Taylor

Driving While Black (2015 feature film directed by Paul Sapiano)

Driving While Black (2021 Documentary directed by )

The Green Book (2018 feature film directed by Peter Farrelly)

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