The Green Book

[CleverBomb]

No, it's not an environmentalist manifesto. It's an artifact of our nation's racist past -- a travel guide book for African-Americans listing places where safe services were available for non-white highway travelers, published from 1936 until 1964.

For nearly three decades, black Americans had one source of reliable information about roadside businesses open to them, dubbed "The Green Book." In 1949, publisher Victor Green wrote about how he hoped his guide would become unnecessary one day.

On Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, it's worth remembering how driving was once an ordeal for a large number of Americans. Just as Jewish travelers once had guides to hotels and restaurants that would serve them when they traveled far from home, "The Negro Motorist's Green Book" offered to do the same for a growing numbers of African-Americans from the Great Depression onward whom could afford cars and wanted to escape the Jim Crow rules prevalent in mass transit.

It's kind of disconcerting that it wasn't obsolete until just a few years before I was born.

-Rusty
(Please do take a look at the linked article at Jalopnik.)