AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

The intersection of travel and safety has been on my mind a lot lately, for some pretty obvious reasons. (I’m guessing you might be in the same boat?) But there’s a less obvious reason: a book.

Specifically Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor, an author, photographer, and cultural documentarian who spent three years in the early aughts road-tripping across the United States—alone, with a “knife under my seat, a stun gun in the car door pocket, and Mace behind the gear shift”—in search of businesses once included in the Green Book. Launched in 1936 by a postman named Victor Green, the Green Book was an indispensable guide for black travelers, listing places—such as hotels, restaurants, and gas stations—throughout the Jim Crow South (and eventually most of the country) that offered supplies and refuge in an era of segregation and sundown towns. But the Green Book was far more than a guidebook.

“The Green Book was a formidable weapon in the fight for equal rights,” Taylor writes. “It gave black Americans permission to venture out onto America’s highways and enjoy the country they helped build.”

How powerful is that? I read Overground Railroad (Abrams Press, January 2020) on my iPad and found myself highlighting sentence after sentence. Taylor’s well-written, well-researched, fury-inducing, heartbreaking (and at times heartwarming) exploration of the roots of black travel lit that much of a fire within me. I hope it will do the same for you—which is why we chose it as the May read for AFAReads.

From a historical perspective, it’s a masterpiece. Yet, one of the many things I loved about Taylor’s book is how totally alive it is. It’s about history, yes, but the book isn’t dusty—it’s a living, breathing entity. That was done with intention, Taylor explains in the introduction: “I wanted to show [the Green Book] in the context of this country’s ongoing struggle with race and social mobility.” In each section, organized chronologically, she splices the evolution of racial politics in the United States with the evolution of the Green Book, which encompassed multiple editions throughout its lifetime. She also introduces us to the few sites—less than 5 percent—that still exist, such as Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Taylor grounds the narrative in the experiences of her stepfather, Ron, who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. But she also includes stories from her 40,000-plus-mile Green Book journey. We’re with her, unnerved, as she encounters a white supremacist sign in Harrison, Arkansas. And we’re seated beside her as she looks into the “bright eyes” of the late Leah Chase, who ran New Orleans’s legendary Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, which was listed in the book for nearly two decades.

Taylor’s time with Leah Chase is among the uplifting stories she shares—awe-inspiring tales of travelers who, despite a world stacked against them, took to the road in search of freedom or opportunity or just plain adventure. There are anecdotes of people outside the black community who provided lodging or food and assisted in the fight for equal rights—who basically acted like human beings. And Taylor touches on the optimism of Victor Green, who wanted to help black Americans travel safely, while also ultimately hoping that his work would be rendered unnecessary by progress.

As most of us know, that hasn’t happened. A modern-day Green Book would be beside the point, Taylor points out, but the twisted legacy of the Jim Crow era (contemporary redlining, police brutality, mass incarceration) means that we still have work to do.

Part of that work, I think, is to read her book. And part of it is to seek out and support existing businesses when we can. To that end, Taylor includes a lengthy guide to touring Green Book sites at the end of the book. And keep an eye out for more ways to engage with Taylor: Overground Railroad is part of a larger, multi-disciplinary project that will eventually include a children’s book, an app with walking tours, and a Smithsonian exhibition slated to open this August at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

Finally, while Taylor’s book touches on travel, she didn’t intend for it to be a book about the history of road-tripping and black travel, she says.

“It’s more of a pilgrimage toward understanding a country so blinded by symbolism that it can’t or won’t tackle the pervasive, relentless forces that created the environment for the Green Book to thrive in the first place,” she writes. “It is a book that I hope will show how we got here and why, after all this time, we still have so far to go.”

Look out for questions posted here in the group to kickstart your reading. And don’t miss our interview with author Candacy Taylor on Instagram Live on May 28 at 12 p.m. PT/3 p.m. ET.

Yours in travel (as a force for good!),

Aislyn Greene
AFAR Senior editor
@aislynj