Community Guide and Reading List
Are you ready to explore your community's Green Book history? Get started with these resources!
Share Your Community’s Green Book History and Build Support
Identify Your Community’s Green Book Locations
Investigate which sites are or were close to your community. Determine which are still standing, what they were previously, and what they are now. The Green Book Projects website is a great place to find information on North Carolina Green Book locations. Is this history common knowledge in your community? If not, consider partnering with other community organizations to help tell the story of the people who worked and possibly lived at that site. Incorporate these local Oasis Spaces in your own programming.
Preserve Locations and Their History
If a site is still in existence but needs repair or interpretation, research what efforts have been made. What local contacts exist who have started these efforts? If nothing has been done, consider creating this effort by building a collaborative team to work together. Research possible grant opportunities or service projects that could help in this effort. If a site has been torn down, research options to interpret its history. Could interpretive signage be created to tell a site’s story?
Host a Community Open House
Invite your local community members to bring their stories and memories to your site at an “open house.” Capture and document these stories appropriately (recorded, written) to share with future generations. What were other locations in or near your community that served in similar roles to Green Book sites? Consider highlighting their stories as well. Host an Event or Start an Ongoing Program. Invite a guest speaker, like a local historian or prominent community representative, to speak on a local site or related topic. Identify other potential local partner organizations with whom to offer collaborative experiences (e.g., walking tour of Oasis Spaces sites). Collaborations can foster larger impacts, but do require planning and communication to be successful.
Community Guide PDF
Additional Resources and Reading
Digital Collections
- Twenty-three original editions of Victor Green’s Negro Motorist Green Book (1937 – 1966) can be viewed in the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections.
- The North Carolina Green Book Portal is an online database of available information for each of the state’s Green Book entries.
Multimedia
The North Carolina Green Book Project Map documents the location and current state of each of the state’s Green Book entries.
The North Carolina Green Book Project’s video library includes short topical videos on the Green Book’s history in North Carolina:
The documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom (2019), is available through different streaming platforms. This is a great way to introduce this history to middle and high school students.
The National Geographic show Black Travel Across America episode Visiting Historic Green Book Location (Full episode) is available on YouTube. This is a great introduction to the historic Green Book locations compared to modern black travel locations nationally.
The Center for Puppetry Arts’ production of Calvin Alexander Ramsey’s children's book, Ruth and the Green Book, by requesting to rent the program. This is a great way to introduce this history to elementary-level students.
The podcast, 'Green Book' Helped African-Americans Travel Safely’, can be heard on NPR’s website.
An archived webpage interactive map based on The Green Book can be found on the New York Public Library’s website.
A short video, Understanding Jim Crow, is a good, quick introduction to Jim Crow history for youth.
Two short introduction videos about the Green Book from the National Trust for Historic Preservation:
Books
Taylor, Candacy. Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America. New York: Abrams Press, 2020.
Loewen, James. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: New Press, 2005.
Children’s Books
Ramsey, Calvin Alexander. Ruth and the Green Book. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2010. Ruth and the Green Book is available to check out for free via a digital download at NC Kids Overdrive using any N.C. public library card.
Online Articles
Agan, Kelly. "The Green Book (The Negro Motorist Green Book; The Negro Travelers; Green Book)." NCpedia, 2019
"Jim Crow and Black Wall Street.” ANCHOR: A North Carolina History Online Resource.
Journal Articles
Armstead, Myra B. Young. "Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure- Travelers, 1880-1950." The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25 (2005): 136-59.
Boyd, Herb. "Victor H. Green and his indispensable 'Green Book'." New York Amsterdam News 14 Apr. 2016: 30.
Foster, Mark S. "In the Face of 'Jim Crow': Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945." The Journal of Negro History 84, no.2 (1999): 130-49.
Hall, Michael Ra-Shon. "The Negro Traveler’s Guide to A Jim Crow South: Negotiating Racialized Landscapes During a Dark Period in United States Cultural History, 1936–1967." Postcolonial Studies 17, no.3 (2014): 307-319.
Seiler, Cotten. "So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By": African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism." American Quarterly 58, no.4 (2006): 1091-117.
Sorin, Gretchen. "The Negro Motorist Green-Book." Ephemera Journal 13. (2010): 16-27.
Townsend, Jacinda. "Driving While Black." Smithsonian 46, no. 11 (2016): 51-53.
Thesis Dissertations
Kennedy, Richard A. "Automobility, Hospitality, African American Tourism, and Mapping Victor H. Green's "Negro Motorist Green Book." East Carolina University, 2013.
Monahan, Meagen Kathleen, "The Green Book": A Representation of the Black Middle Class and Its Resistance to Jim Crow through Entrepreneurship and Respectability" (2013).
Educational Resources on Discussing Hard, Painful, and/or Difficult History
Books
Rose, Julia. Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Online Sources
Teaching Tolerance. A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Tips for Tackling Sensitive History & Controversial Current Events in the Classroom.” Carolina K-12, 2020.
Shuster, Kate. “Teaching Hard History.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018.
Shuster, Kate. “The March Continues: Five Essential Practices for Teaching the Civil Rights Movement.” Teaching Tolerance, 2020.