Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

by Gretchen Sorin

It’s hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for African Americans. Before the Civil War, masters confined their slaves to their property, while free black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned, and even kidnapped. Restrictions on movement before Emancipation carried over, in different forms, into Reconstruction and beyond; for most of the 20th century, many white Americans felt blithely comfortable denying their black countrymen the right to travel freely on trains and buses. Yet it became more difficult to shackle someone who was cruising along a highway at 45 miles per hour.


In Driving While Black, the acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin reveals how the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. She recounts the creation of a parallel, unseen world of black motorists, who relied on travel guides, black only businesses, and informal communications networks to keep them safe. From coast to coast, mom and pop guest houses and tourist homes, beauty parlors, and even large hotels—including New York’s Hotel Theresa, the Hampton House in Miami, or the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles—as well as night clubs and restaurants like New Orleans’ Dooky Chase and Atlanta’s Paschal’s, fed travelers and provided places to stay the night. At the heart of Sorin’s story is Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book, a travel guide begun in 1936, which helped grant black Americans that most basic American rite, the family vacation.


As Sorin demonstrates, black travel guides and black-only businesses encouraged a new way of resisting oppression. Black Americans could be confident of finding welcoming establishments as they traveled for vacation or for business. Civil Rights workers learned where to stay and where to eat in the South between marches and protests. As Driving While Black reminds us, the Civil Rights Movement was just that—a movement of black people and their allies in defiance of local law and custom. At the same time, she shows that the car, despite the freedoms it offered, brought black people up against new challenges, from segregated ambulance services to unwarranted traffic stops, and the racist violence that too often followed.


Interwoven with Sorin’s own family history and enhanced by dozens of little known images, Driving While Black charts how the automobile fundamentally reshaped African American life, and opens up an entirely new view onto one of the most important issues of our time.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Travel, African American, Politics, Social Justice

332 pages, Hardcover

First published February 11, 2020

About the author

Gretchen Sullivan Sorin is distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. She has curated innumerable exhibits―including with the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum and the New York State Historical Association―and lives in upstate New York.

Reviews

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 4 out of 5]

So eye-opening. Can't wait to watch the PBS documentary!

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative, but the presentation is scattered, cluttered and not well-organized. The scope of the book is much broader (perhaps too broad) than the relationship of African American history to the availability of the automobile. The book combines history with memoir.

[Cynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early 1970s I became aware enough to notice what my hispanic parents were experiencing as we traveled the American Southwest. Our middle class respectability was often not enough. I started to notice that my father often had difficulty securing hotel rooms and that we at least once were denied service at a restaurant. I learned early on not to question or to tell what I noticed. But no one could stop from noticing and noting. If my father had had access to a hispanic equivalent of the Green Book, much indignity and difficulty could have been sidestepped.

Here in Driving While Black, Gretchen Sorin professor at State University of New York describes her family's experiences and many other's experiences of traveling while black. Among other things, here can be found

* Reasons for preference of large performance cars.
* Development of small businesses owned and operated by black people to serve black people, sometimes people of other colors and ethnicities as well.
* Popularity of the Green Book which helped shape an easier travel experience in parts of US, Canada, and the Caribbean.

Although experiences of driving while driving are not all okay and equalized, yet progress has been made and can still be made. In the Appendix, various professionals provide their opinions about how traveling while black may still improve.

I read this book because long ago I studied MLK most particularly and various other civil rights leaders as well of the post-WWII period. Now I want to know how working class and middle class blacks and their allies worked to put into action what the leaders were dreaming and urging.

Read for my multi-year civil rights study, this year, black civil rights.

[Jennifer Schultz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read if you: Want a sharp and moving account of the hardships, struggles, and danger African-American travelers faced (and continue to face) while traveling, as well as the importance of the automobile and The Green Book during the Jim Crow era.

With Driving While Black being published in the same publishing period as The Overground Railroad, comparisons will inevitably be made. If you are wondering if you should order one or both for your library/bookstore/personal collection: order and read both. While they do both cover the history of African-American travel and The Green Book, both approach this history in personal yet distinct ways. Driving While Black is more focused on the importance of the rise of car ownership among African-Americans as well as the various predecessors of The Green Book (The Overground Railroad focuses more on the actual guide and on the businesses included in The Green Book, as well as current crisis). This is a fascinating and eye-opening look at a part of history that should be more widely known.

Many thanks to W.W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another one of those books that brings to my attention the fact that I've lived in a pale world that was a bundle of carefully catered experiences, brought to me through the careful training of my people by ?society? by ?ancestors? by agreed upon social contracts that go back centuries. . .

An eye-opener. . .I loved road trips with my family, my granny, my aunts and uncles! I remember those burma-shave signs, and Sambo restaurants, all which make me wince as I read along, a complict toddler, yelling out sayings that are not at all politically correct today. . .I had no idea what they meant beyond hearing them bounced off the walls during community gatherings. If those folks were still alive now, I would question them, but that ship sailed long ago. . .

Where we were on the class scale was probably below middle class, but some of the very things discussed in this book, we did as well - always had a night on the road pack, "Just in case", TP in the trunk, "just in case." The men in our tribe only stopped at gas station bathrooms for the grown older women amongst us - men, young women and kids got a stop by the side of the road only. Anything more expensive than Motel 6 (which meant $6 for a room) was not happening - and Mom believed the car was cleaner than a motel, so it was a rare time we ever sat our skinny butts on the infamous vibrating beds. That said, we never worried about attacks, abuses, and police never stopped our cars. (OK, just once - on Route 66, heading to Texas, Granny was going over 90, with 3 kids loosely rolling between the front and back, days before seat belts. When finally stopped (and there was a long stretch of ignoring the lights behind her), she said she was just trying to catch the young feller ahead of her to let him know he was going too fast and might get caught. The policeman just patted her arm and told her to leave the speeders to him, and to slow down. No ticket.)

We drove those same roads. Despite the many books I've been reading over these years as voices share their truths, it is still an uncomfortable education to read this book about the differences in our drives and our lives. Too slow in happening, but it is welcomed and needed. Listening ears are hearing.

[audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A painful and enlightening amalgam of US history, sociology, urban planning, oral history, and memoir.

Why are we still dealing with police in the United States executing Black Americans during traffic stops? Because, this book explains, ever since slavery, white people have expected to be able to control the physical location of Black people. And the social and legal system of the United States explicitly supports that expectation all the way down to the present day.

From slave-catching patrols through to the mess of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, white people have had systemic support in continuing to assume they could and should involve themselves in the movement of Black Americans.

That included curfews for Black people that whites were socially and legally rewarded for enforcing.

That included no legal repercussions for white people who injured and/or killed Black people who they felt weren't in the "correct place", whether that be a segregated section of a bus or train, or a part of town or even an entire town or county.

That included areas of the country that publicly deputized white people to be an extra-judicious force for maintaining racism in public.

This situation extended from expectations of who got to occupy the sidewalk and who walked in the road, to the rules of the road for horse-drawn carriages, and through to how America's love affair with the automobile challenged those expectations.

After all, as the author points out, it's easy for a white person to identify and address a Black person they want to harass when both are on foot or in (relatively) slow-moving carriages, but it's entirely another thing to try to be a racist at highway speeds. How can you even tell what color the other driver is in order to properly harass them?

(Yes. I know. Somehow, some people still manage. However, when you consider that racism has been baked into the system from the start, the highway speed thing greatly cut down on that harassment. And if you don't believe me, there's a ton of well-cited stories in this book.)

This all feeds in as background to the main narrative of how Black Americans accessed roads and automobiles, as people subject to ongoing racist atrocities: how sales figures indicating the popularity of certain makes and models of cars can be explained by their reliability (fewer breakdowns = fewer chances of encountering violence) and their size (larger cars = a safer ride for your family, when you know there's a non-zero chance you'll be shot at and/or forced to sleep in your car when no hostelry will let you in the doors).

Again, it is both exquisitely well-cited, including the author's tales from her own Black family, and incredibly heart-breaking.

Yes, roads and freeways were designed to restrict Black movement in this country.

Yes, they were constructed over and through Black areas of towns and cities.

And yes, we have such a long way to go (pun intended) in fixing this mess. Highly recommended.

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Driving While Black by Gretchen Sorin is a multi-layered book, where they author relates much of her own family’s experience with Jim Crow and the automobile, but also the important history about mobility and race. She provides the balance of what restrictions mean in people’s lives with a broad look at travel for African Americans and how those efforts connect to civil rights.

The narratives about her family and others are rich and help people see how everyday racism hurts. The humiliation of Jim Crow cars, the back of the bus, going in the front door to pay for the bus and then exiting and return via the backdoor. Moving in White space was not safe and it constantly reminded people of their second-class status. Including the reality of being out of some towns by sun-down. These are not just southern stories, but patterns in the north were also shape by de facto segregation. One can understand the unwillingness of family members to share such stories, but Sorin has enough here for us to grasp.

The automobile is a way of escape the painful reminders, but it also has its own problems, since White people resented Black people owning cars. The reality of White supremacy is interesting, since egos had to be so fragile. White people saw Black people buying Buick and Cadillacs as their seeking equality of status with them. White privilege is invisible. Black people bought big cars to cope with Jim Crow. They might have to sleep in the car, because they could not find accommodations along the road. They also had to travel with everything they needed, not just food, but pillows and blankets for sleeping. They needed a solid engine, since they did not want to break down and open themselves to other troubles. They needed a powerful engine to get them to get out of awkward situations.

Sorin presents this reality, but also in the days of housing restrictions and other problems, Black people could buy cars, whereas they might not be able to buy homes. If they got a home, they might not be able to get homeowners insurance. Jim Crow required so much negotiations. Sorin explores the ways that the Black community resisted. Buying a car is a way of opting out of the old system.

Yet, people had to also develop an infrastructure for safe traveling. The Green book and other travel guides, as well as the guest houses, hotels, and lodging available along the road. People also needed eating establishments; however, many families packed their meals for the trip. The development of such establishments was part of the resistance. It was a critical source of income for many women who cooked meals, and used money for survival and supporting the civil rights movement.

The travel guides, of which the Green Book is the most important, were also evidence of resistance and advocacy for rights. The networking and behind the scenes work to construct such guidebooks was invisible to many Americans, who take for granted that they can go where they want. Writers and staff did research and shared what they learned. Victor Green and other publishers were creative in pushing corporations to recognize Black Americans as consumers. Not only did ESSO pump gas and let Black people use restrooms, they were also pioneering in facilitating franchises for Black gas station owners. ESSO station also distributed the Green Book, often with their own advertisement.

Given the Hollywood film, there is much attention to the Green Book, but Sorin is telling a more complex story. Accommodations for Black people varied, some were excellent, while other were failing, but we did have resorts and lodgings that not only provided middle class Black people with a pleasant way to vacation, but income for those proprietors. Sorin highlights some of these business people, whose work might not be appreciated today. As federal laws, initially Interstate commerce with the buses and railroads, reshape the landscape, people are still at risk on the road, but there is a greater likelihood to travel safe.

Yet, cars can mean accidents—that means in a segregated society there are separate ambulances and hospitals—with Negro hospitals having few beds. People died because of institutionalized racism in medical facilities and transport. Some Black funeral directors had a combination coach, a vehicle that was both an ambulance and a hearse. Still getting to where you could get medical treatment was not assured.

Black enterprises were also the safe havens for people in the civil rights movement. Many stayed in the Gaston Hotel in Birmingham and other motels and lodgings. These owners gave people space for meetings, but also were often the sites where people reunited with families when they were released from jails. In southern communities, such actions put them at risk. The businesses that supported people during an era of Jim Crow were also the first to die, as not only did the Civil Right Act open new employment for Black people, but some of those jobs involved travel and people could do so in major chain motels and hotels, which they could not do in earlier days. Musicians, athletes as well as businessmen and women, were challenged in many ways when it came to traveling before these laws.

Now we still see the dangers of driving while Black, which is evidence of the racism that still plagues the nation and shaped the daily decisions that many people of color make. Gretchen Sorin is part of the team working with Ric Burns on a documentary film. So even if you do not read the book, look for the film.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars? I learned a lot from this book, but it was also a bit slow or repetitive at times, and I wondered if I would've learned as much from the PBS documentary in a much shorter time.
Some of the information was not new to me, but there were some details that perhaps should've been obvious to me but were not - for example, that hospitals and ambulances were segregated, and a Black person in a car accident might have to wait for all of the white victims to be treated first, and a great many died while waiting for a Black ambulance or while being driven from hospital to hospital and being turned away because only beds for white people were available.
There were lots of personal stories and great images. Overall I enjoyed the book and found it informative and pretty easy to read. Reading the acknowledgments I realized the research that it took to compile all this information was considerable. I'm not a fan of cars generally, but this book made me appreciate the incredible changes they brought to the lives of many African Americans.

[Ivy Pittman-Outen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this book. From the first page Sorin grabbed my attention as she recalled what is was like traveling as a little girl with her parents from Newark, New Jersey to Fayetteville, North Carolina in the turbulent 60's. As a little girl I also traveled to North Carolina from New Jersey, East Orange,with my grandparents - my grandfather driving through the night and stopping once or twice for me to go the bathroom on the side of the road. I didn't see anything unusual about it until I was older and learned about the horrors of Jim Crow and the KKK.
Sorin tells the impact that the automobile industry had on African American as it freed them to travel without the restrictions of segregated seating on buses and trains.
Driving While Black is not just about driving while black, but a journey into the pre-civil rights movement and beyond and the slow rise of the middle class.

[Jarrett Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Travel has always been a fraught experience for African Americans. Whether by bus, train, airplane, or automobile, every Black person has a story to tell about various microaggressions, embarrassments, indignities, or violence they have suffered due to racism while traveling. Even in the twenty-first century, when Black people enjoy more political and economic power than at any other time in American history, many of us are still aggrieved when we choose to travel to any part of the United States or abroad. These fears and traumatic episodes are valid and should not be ignored.

Driving While Black by Gretchen Sorin is an historical record of decades of racist incidents Black travelers encountered throughout the Jim Crow era, and even today, when driving while Black can result in murder by cops. This is an academic text that is totally accessible to all readers. It is carefully structured and includes various accounts of African Americans forced to endure physical, emotional, and psychological torture due to systemic racism and segregation. I don't think many white people understand the degree of fear, stress, and shame that goes into travelling while Black, when you are denied even the basic dignity of being able to use a toilet, eat clean food, or take a sip of water simply because of the color of your skin.

Although Driving While Black will infuriate readers, it stands as a testament to the power of African Americans to withstand a host of injustices, from being denied a seat on a bus to being pulled from a car and lynched simply for getting lost in the wrong neighborhood. Black people know how to unify, organize, resist, and fight back. We are nothing if not resourceful. The automobile, as Sorin shows, serves as a physical and symbolic instrument of resistance to racism, a way of both empowering and liberating Black people, a demonstration of their economic power, and their ability to navigate the inhumane Jim Crow laws that made such a big-ticket purchase a necessity. As an African American, reading this book gave me so much insight into my grandfather's reasons for owning roomy cars and the impetus, inherited from older generations, for African Americans to purchase luxury vehicles. I get it now.

Anyone committed to antiracist policies or who considers themselves a Black Lives Matter ally must read Driving While Black. It is a book that offers painful yet necessary history lessons on the perniciousness of racism and as well as the strength, solidarity, and creativity of African Americans. I also recommend that people read this book in tandem with Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen. These are hard books to absorb but don't wimp out--all of us must learn from them. History repeats itself, and if we want to avoid a resurgence of the atrocities of the past we must acknowledge them and work together to ensure we don't repeat them.

[Jeimy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five years ago I was chosen to recreate the march from Selma to Montgomery for its 50th anniversary. It was at the Lowndes Interpretative Center (the midway the midway point) that I first heard of the famous Green Book and saw a pee can (among other articles) in an exhibit about taking road trips to/through the segregated south if you were African American.

Last year I saw the Smithsonian’s documentary titled The Green Book: Guide to Freedom and it painted a fuller picture about the perils African Americans faced, but also of the sanctuaries they found along the way.


This book rounded out my education. It begins by talking about automobiles in general and the changes they brought to the American lifestyle; then explains how the African American middle class started to buy cars and what their preferences were-big cars to accommodate their traveling needs. The chapter “Driving While Black” deals with the threat of stopping anywhere that was predominantly while and how African Americans preferred to drive through the night so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of finding accommodations along the way. Then we come to the guides themselves, including a chapter dedicated to The Negro Motorist Green Book, which is followed by a chapter on accommodations along the way. There is one chapter that stands out. Titled “Through the Windshield,” it deals with sundown towns—which I knew about but still make my blood boil—but also the inordinate amount of racial stereotypes they encountered in the form of restaurants. I had to stop reading by this point. I waited until I calm down and picked the book right back up.

All in all this is a very thorough book. It is an easy read (in terms of writing style, not subject matter) and I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to learn more about the indignities African Americans faced until fairly recently when they tried to do something as innocuous as take a road trip. Although who are we kidding, driving while black can still be perilous, as the author of this book also points out.

[Avid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well researched and just a very informative read. I loved that the author was able to combine US driving/highway history with the evolution (such as it is) of civil rights for POC. There were many fascinating tidbits about road maps, the hospitality and entertainment industries, black culture, and the origins of highway policing.

Some of the information was basically repeated in two or more chapters, which made the book unnecessarily long, but it didn’t hurt to have the review. The epilogue about the need for community-minded policing was a bonus, and worth sticking around for. I really feel enriched by having read this book. Well, listened to the audio. Good narrator, too. Definitely recommend.

[Aileen B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting and enlightening book. However, there was a lot of repetition and circling around topics already discussed in previous chapters. While the writing fell short for me, the overall message was important and made this a worthwhile read.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth look at the effect of the automobile has made on the mobility, safety, and independence of African Americans. I enjoyed the book, but there was quite a bit of repetition.

[Rachel Coyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important blend of history and biography. Everyone should read this book

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounding up. Super fascinating overall, and I learned a ton, especially about Jim Crow America. However, this book suffers from some technical issues including poor editing (a lot of repetition that should have been caught and edited down) and it kind of changes themes about halfway through. Pretty much the entire second half of the book is focused on The Green Book - not necessarily a bad thing, but it just felt like the overall book was not entirely focused on its intended theme. Overall the writing is engaging, which is rare for a book by a career historian! But it definitely needed to be edited better for content.

Apparently there is a documentary version of the book - if you're at all interested in this topic but not keen to read an entire book, I'd recommend tracking it down as I'm sure it would be similarly fascinating, and likely more cohesive.

Someone needs to recommend this book to Jordan Peele as there is plenty of inspiration for his next horror film in here.

[Macartney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps it's my fault for misunderstanding the hook of the book in the first place, but this book is less an exploration of the effect of cars for or against Black folk and more of a romantic, nostalgia-driven paean to the "golden age" of automobiling, racism be damned.

The entire genesis of this book seems to start from Sorin's discovery of the "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a guidebook published between 1936 and 1967 that assisted Black travelers in finding places to eat, sleep, fuel, etc. during the height of segregation and Jim Crow. She works backwards from there, however, to construct some pretty grandiose (and flimsy upon touch) claims about the benefits of cars for not just all Americans, but Black Americans specifically during this time period, even when the facts she includes (not to mention the vast array of ones she doesn't) complicate if not undermine the claims.

The tone throughout resembles a PBS documentary (which this apparently became) or a Smithsonian museum exhibit (which Sorin has curated over the years): enlightening but not paradigm shifting; uplifting but not upsetting.

Towards the end of the book she finally touches on the modern meaning of the phrase "driving while Black" but when she shares her experience as a Black mother having to repeatedly warning her son to be careful when driving, she nonetheless has to also bend over backwards to defend, apologize and give context for policing -- even going so far as to including in the appendix four pages of verbatim dialogue from a police chief justifying police behavior at traffic stops.

One of the thrusts that I found interesting and wanted more exploration of was the frustration and disdain that Black Americans had towards public and private transit due to its embrace of racist policies. Quote after quote of Black transit rider, excited to get an automobile because it meant they could leave behind the segregated trains on which they were treated with little to no respect. Sorin, of course, shares these as evidence that the car is/was obviously a better choice -- but they hit a nerve for me, forcing me to (again) complicate my idea that mass transit is inherently mass freedom, allowing everyone to get where they need to go in as efficient, affordable and easy way as possible. Sorin rightfully reminds us/me that there is always a requirement from transit options for more than just mere conveyance; it also requires dignity and respect. This dynamic around Black transit riders was obviously explicit during the Jim Crow era, and I'd like to see more exploration of its embodiment in other less overtly or "explicitly" racist eras.

This dichotomy between public and private spaces is a big difference between communal modes of transit (buses, trains, planes) and individual modes (cars). Over and over (and over), Sorin catalogues the benefits that this new-found privacy and "force field" of safety provided Black Americans for the first time when traveling. But she pretty much ignores the litany of negative effects and externalities. And it ends undermining the entire book, in my opinion.

While she does admit that the car lifestyle came with drawbacks (traveling through anti-black towns, struggling to find non-racist gas stations, being vulnerable to police stops for no reason other than the color of your skin), she elides so many other drawbacks of the car dependency lifestyle in the USA; drawbacks that--for the entirety of the last 80 years-- unduly affected Black Americans at a higher rate than others: destruction of Black neighborhoods to build highways so White commuters could more quickly reach their homes in segregated suburban sprawl, the corresponding defunding of public transit and of urban cities, long commute times from lack of available or allowed housing next to employment sites, and high costs both financial (so many going forced to go into debt and financial ruin to buy and maintain a car) to health (obesity, smog induced asthma, and obviously deaths and severe injuries from crashes).

I've personally explored and studied in depth the effect of cars on this country and its residents and have (obviously) come down on the side against them. And I understand other folks study and engage and come to a different analysis. Thats okay. But at a very minimum, you have to at least honestly engage with the true reality of cars and car dependency if you are going to write a book on how great they were/are -- otherwise you're just (car) propaganda.

Which maybe Sorin set out to do? I don't know. She very clearly has fond memories of her childhood and the role her family automobile played in that. She very clearly views the automobile as a successful and pleasure giving tool that the Black middle and upper classes used to enhance their stature in a racist society and to increase their ability to navigate its dangers. But she doesn't ever give us the data to say whether those folks were representative of the whole or what those folks who couldn't afford a car or a vacation were doing at the time. She doesn't give us any insight into those stuck on a defunded mass transit or displaced due to highway building. She doesn't give us any insight into the amount of money, life or limbs that the automobile has cost Black Americans.

She set out to write a different book than that, and perhaps this is all my fault for not accepting that.

[Mary Sisney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This timely book is full of interesting facts about the humiliation and dangers that even famous blacks like gospel singer Mahalia Jackson faced when they travelled during the first half of the 20th Century. I was surprised by some of the information. Contrary to the myth of blacks loving Cadillacs, Sorin reports that the most popular car for blacks back then was the cheaper Buick because it was reliable (less likely to break down in a scary area) and large enough to sleep in when there was no place else to spend the night. I also was reminded once again that Jim Crow reigned all over the USA, not just in the South. Blacks couldn’t stay in hotels in New York, Maine, and California. Just as the integration of schools cost black teachers jobs (that happened in my barely southern hometown in Kentucky), so the integration of hotels, motels, and restaurants put many black owners out of business. My one problem with the book was repetition. Sorin writes as if she believes that readers either have bad memories or will read only select chapters instead of the entire book.

[Mystic Miraflores · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone born in the early 1960s and raised in US military communities, I was probably insulated from Jim Crow and the African-American experience. I am now catching up on that history, thanks to authors such as Ms. Sorin and other talented historians and journalists. I first encountered the "Green Book" experience at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which I have visited twice so far. I highly recommend this museum, by the way. I appreciate how Ms. Sorin weaved her personal and family history in with the history of African-American automobile and other forms of travel in general. Those of us from other ethnic groups didn't have to worry about finding restrooms, motels, restaurants, etc. as we traveled around the US. The anxiety-producing travel African-Americans had to experience was really eye-opening to me.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Book

I learned a lot about how freeing the automobile was for African Americans and how it freed them from having to travel by train or bus and being subjected to segregation and even getting kicked off because white passengers wanted the seat or car. The book covers how autos and the building of roads allowed them to travel like never before. It also shows how being able to drive allowed civil rights leaders to be undetected and stay in spots unknown to authorities. The Green Book guided people to spots for gas, food and lodging. Businesses like ESSO gas stations welcomed African Americans and their business. A great overall story about how freeing driving is and why we like it. And for African Americans it had extra special reason to be beneficial.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and the idea that Black Americans had subverted racism by creating a resource to help them navigate the country. I did feel that the author was somewhat repetitive and provided excessive support for the ideas put forth. I tried not to think that this was perhaps because she felt one or two examples would be pushed aside as exemptions rather than the rule. Some of the destinations mentioned in the book sounded lovely and like places I would like to visit. While I probably wouldn't have been welcome when they existed, I am saddened to know they aren't there now.

[Joelle Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black History Month #6

For the past three years, I have engaged in a comprehensive study of race, racism (systematic or otherwise ), implicit bias, and the effect of it upon our nation. I have found myself, this month, having to put down books because of the deep weight I feel.

Then I think about how I am affected by just reading books; what is the weight that People of Color feel as they battle racism every day, every year - from birth to death?

And I know that my journey has just barely started.

[Zia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enlightening book about an underreported part of the civil rights struggle. She has an interesting take on how the automobile and increasing travel within the U.S. by black people aided progress for equal rights. There is so much interesting history and little tidbits about informal economies that arouse out of necessity and the history of segregation and racist eateries / hotels forced into integration by federal law and social pressure.

[Moises · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give the audiobook 2 stars. I was familiar with much of the information but I did learn some new details. The presentation was in the form of a cross between memoir and history. I felt the final product would have been better served if focused on either one. The physical book gets 3 stars for the photographs. There were many I hadn't seen before and can help drive the message home.

[Denise Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many stories here, both historical and personal, that it is a bit overwhelming at times. But it still is an organized and important read. Well-researched and often fascinating. Sadly, so many problems still exist.

[Jill Kleis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating look at the freedoms that driving/owning an automobile had for Black Americans in the early and mid 20th century, while hand in hand delivering them into deep danger depending on when and how they drove. Well written and researched.

[Katy]

I received my copy free through Goodreads Giveaways

[Debby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Would highly recommend.

[Kiarag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that recounts the history of African Americans who survived and thrived during Jim Crow to today with the help of the auto mobile.

[Kadhir Patchamuthu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d give it a 4.25 stars. There’s a lot of extremely important and detailed information from several anecdotes to studies about what driving was like in the Jim Crow era. The importance of having the automobile as an escape of Jim Crow era laws along with the insane degradation black people faced but still facing racism while driving.

I think what would make this 5/5 for me would be to discuss, at least as a chapter or a small subsection, is the building of all of these highways and roads. There were points made about the targeting of low income (minority) neighborhoods as less safe but I wish there was at least some mention of the insane levels of targeted practice of relocation of black people to build the highways they would use to continue to experiment Jim Crow racism. I know it’s difficult to make that point when the title is to define the importance of the automobile as a tool to reject, rebel, and challenge Jim Crow and racism but I think having this additional nuance would’ve tied it nicely together

Still a very valuable read and very interesting.

(genuinely insane the story about the man(and his friends) who told the two black couples to walk to the bridge and jump in or get shot and faced no repercussions, one of many stories happening less than 80 years ago).