Module 9 Podcast – 'Green Book' Helped African-Americans Travel Safely

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The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide that listed lodgings, tailors and other businesses that welcomed black patrons during Jim Crow. The guide, which was launched in 1936 and published for nearly 30 years, found a readership because while blacks knew which businesses were friendly in their hometowns, it could be difficult to discern which restaurants, beauty shops and night clubs were off-limits or hostile when they were on the road. Civil rights leader Julian Bond tells NPR's Neal Conan that he remembers his family using the Green Book "to travel in the South, to find out where we could stop to eat, where we could spend the night in a hotel or in somebody's home."