in 1956 Before the legislative accomplishments of the
civil rights movement, car journeys for black people were fraught with difficulty and potential danger. They were subjected to
racial profiling by police departments ("
driving while black") and sometimes seen as "uppity" or "too prosperous" just for the act of driving, which many whites regarded as a white prerogative. They risked harassment or worse on and off the highway. A bitter commentary published in a 1947 issue of the
NAACP's official magazine,
The Crisis, highlighted the uphill struggle black people faced in recreational travel: Thousands of communities in the US had enacted Jim Crow laws that existed after 1890; in such
sundown towns, African Americans were in danger if they stayed past sunset. They were aided in this by the
Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had made it illegal to discriminate against African Americans in
public accommodations and public transportation. It was a problem that came to affect an increasing number of black people in the first decades of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of southern African-Americans migrated from farms in the south to factories and domestic service in the north. No longer confined to living at a subsistence level, many gained disposable income and time to engage in leisure travel. In
Cincinnati, the African American newspaper editor
Wendell Dabney wrote of the situation in the 1920s that "hotels, restaurants, eating and drinking places, almost universally are closed to all people in whom the least tincture of colored blood can be detected". George Schuyler reported in 1943, "Many colored families have motored all across the United States without being able to secure overnight accommodations at a single tourist camp or hotel." He suggested that black Americans would find it easier to travel abroad than in their own country. One incident reported by Drake and Cayton illustrated the discriminatory treatment meted out even to black people within racially mixed groups:
Coping with discrimination on the road While automobiles made it much easier for black Americans to be independently mobile, the difficulties they faced in traveling were such that, as
Lester Granger of the
National Urban League put it, "so far as travel is concerned, Negroes are America's last pioneers". Black travelers often had to carry buckets or portable toilets in the trunks of their cars because they were usually barred from bathrooms and rest areas in service stations and roadside stops. Travel essentials such as gasoline were difficult to purchase because of discrimination at gas stations. To avoid such problems on long trips, African Americans often packed meals and carried containers of gasoline in their cars. Writing of the road trips he made as a boy in the 1950s,
Courtland Milloy of the
Washington Post recalled that his mother spent the evening before the trip frying chicken and boiling eggs so that his family would have something to eat along the way the next day. One black motorist observed in the early 1940s that while black travelers felt free in the mornings, by the early afternoon a "small cloud" had appeared. By the late afternoon, "it casts a shadow of apprehension on our hearts and sours us a little. 'Where', it asks us, 'will you stay tonight?'" Even in towns which did not exclude overnight stays by black people, accommodations were often very limited. African Americans migrating to California to find work in the early 1940s often found themselves camping by the roadside overnight for lack of any hotel accommodation along the way. They were acutely aware of the discriminatory treatment that they received. Courtland Milloy's mother, who took him and his brother on road trips when they were children, recalled: African American travelers faced real physical risks because of the widely differing rules of segregation that existed from place to place and the possibility of extrajudicial violence against them. Activities that were accepted in one place could provoke violence a few miles down the road. Transgressing formal or unwritten racial codes, even inadvertently, could put travelers in considerable danger. Even driving etiquette was affected by racism; in the
Mississippi Delta region, local custom prohibited black people from overtaking whites, to prevent their raising dust from the unpaved roads to cover white-owned cars. Stopping anywhere that was not known to be safe, even to allow children in a car to relieve themselves, presented a risk; Milloy noted that his parents would urge him and his brother to control their need to use a bathroom until they could find a safe place to stop, as "those backroads were simply too dangerous for parents to stop to let their little black children pee". Road trip narratives by black people reflected their unease and the dangers they faced, presenting a more complex outlook from those written by whites extolling the joys of the road. Milloy recalls the menacing environment that he encountered during his childhood, in which he learned of "so many black travelers ... just not making it to their destinations". The snub caused an international incident, to which an embarrassed President
Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by inviting Gbedemah to breakfast at the White House. Repeated and sometimes violent incidents of discrimination directed against black African diplomats, particularly on
U.S. Route 40, the southern part of the principal route between New York and Washington, D.C., led to the administration of President
John F. Kennedy setting up a Special Protocol Service Section within the
State Department to assist black diplomats traveling and living within the United States. The State Department considered issuing copies of
The Negro Motorist Green Book to black diplomats, but eventually decided against steering them to black-friendly public accommodations as it wanted them to be treated equally to white diplomats.
John A. Williams wrote in his 1965 book,
This Is My Country Too, that he did not believe "white travelers have any idea of how much nerve and courage it requires for a Negro to drive coast to coast in America". He achieved it with "nerve, courage, and a great deal of luck", supplemented by "a rifle and shotgun, a road atlas, and
Travelguide, a listing of places in America where Negroes can stay without being embarrassed, insulted, or worse". == Role of the
Green Book ==