Victor Hugo Green was a postal worker in Harlem in 1936. Like most Black Americans who could afford an automobile, he had learned that driving across the United States required a knowledge of geography that no ordinary road atlas contained: which towns had gas stations that would sell to Black customers, which restaurants would serve them, which hotels would rent them a room, and — most importantly — which towns to avoid altogether, because they were sundown towns where Black people caught inside municipal limits after dark were liable to be murdered.
In 1936, Green and his wife, Alma Duke Green, published the first edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book, a forty-page pamphlet listing businesses across New York State that would serve Black customers. The project was, at its origin, a local document. Within five years, it had expanded to cover the entire United States. Within ten, it covered Mexico, Bermuda, and parts of the Caribbean and Canada. At its peak, it was published annually in runs of fifteen thousand copies and was available at every Esso (now ExxonMobil) gas station in the country — Esso being one of the only national gasoline chains that did not enforce segregated service.
The Green Book's entries were sourced by a network of Black correspondents, travelers, and postal workers whom Green solicited in each edition's editorial front matter. The listings covered hotels, tourist homes (private residences that took in Black travelers), restaurants, service stations, beauty parlors, drugstores, tailors, liquor stores, and nightclubs. Each entry was, implicitly, a promise: you can enter this establishment without being refused, humiliated, or harmed.
