Patronize those and other minority businesses, she exhorts, in her “What We Can Do” section at the end of the book. But some remain, and Taylor has assembled a marvelous state-by-state list of historic "Green Book" structures and even a few businesses still in operation.
One unintended consequence of integration, she laments, was that many Black-owned businesses listed in the "Green Book" struggled to survive. Taylor finishes on a note of melancholic loss, overlaid with resolute pragmatism.
The Route 66 chapter will likely complicate any retro-postcard nostalgia you may harbor about that storied road - with sections on Fantastic Caverns, a Klan-operated tourist site in Missouri where cross burnings were held, and on the massacre of Black citizens in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, once considered the “Black Wall Street.” history, such as the Great Migration and the civil rights era. Each chapter highlights a different era of the guide and touches on a related theme in U.S. Readers, too, will come to know this America, if they don’t already. Those stories and images will carry readers along on Taylor’s own journey, which is both spatial and philosophical: “With the Green Book in the rear view mirror,” she writes, “I saw America for what it is, not what it imagines itself or even aspires to be.” With "Overground Railroad", Taylor - an author, photographer, and cultural documentarian - has created a compelling and informative history, as well as a beautiful volume filled with images from various editions of the Green Book, archival photos of the people and places she highlights, and photographs she took of the surviving Green Book businesses. Not only did it show Black travelers where they could go, but it was also a compelling marketing tool that supported Black-owned businesses and celebrated Black self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship.” The guide may not have been overtly political, but as a survival tool, it was quietly subversive. “When I first saw it, I was struck that something so simple, and so practical, could be so powerful. “It represented the fundamental optimism of a race of people facing tyranny and terrorism,” writes Taylor.
#Black man driving railroad story full#
Even Coca-Cola machines were labeled for whites only.ĭespite these obstacles, Black Americans took to the road, armed with strategies to stay safe: aliases and supporting props, bedding, ice chests full of food and drinks, portable privies, gas cans - and often the "Green Book". Taylor underscores that fact with recollections like Burford’s and descriptions of the ugly realities Black motorists faced, including all-white “sundown towns” that barred them from the city limits after dark, the refusal of basic services at many white-owned businesses, and national parks with few (or no) facilities for Black vacationers. Which is why "Overground Railroad" is more than a chronicle of the "Green Book" itself it’s a blunt-force reality check to anyone who refuses to grasp that the freedom of the open road - and the American dream itself - has not historically been open to all Americans. But knowing isn’t really knowing for those of us who haven’t lived the experience. As anyone sentient in America surely knows, Black travelers in the Jim Crow era faced uncertainty and humiliation - and often far worse. In the first chapter, titled “Driving While Black,” Taylor makes it clear why such a guide was vital. Several such guides existed, but the "Green Book", created by a postal worker from Harlem named Victor Hugo Green, had the longest run and the highest circulation. It’s a powerful opening scene for Taylor’s cultural history of the "Green Book", an extraordinary guide published from 1936 to 1967 to help Black travelers find places to safely sleep, eat, shop, or service their vehicles.
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