The Green Book: How to Read a Route

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up method course on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the annual travel guide Victor H. Green published from 1936 to 1966 so Black American motorists could find lodging, food, fuel, and repair without being turned away or endangered. This is not a tour of famous places. It teaches you to DO something: to open a digitized edition at the Schomburg Center, read a listing down to its abbreviations and its silences, chain listings into an actual route across a state line, read a gap in the listings as evidence rather than as a hole, map the cities the book leaned on, and research what happened to an address after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after urban renewal, and after the interstates. It closes with a research assignment you carry out yourself on a real address. Prerequisite for every site course in the route series.