The Green Book, also known as The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guide book for African-American road users. It was invented and published by New York's American email manager, Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the Jim Crow laws, when it was opened and often legalized for American discrimination, especially for non-whites. Although racism is rampant and poverty with black car ownership restrictions, the African middle-class emerges to buy cars as soon as possible, but faces many dangers and accidents along the road, since refusing food and detention. In response, Green wrote his guide on services and neighborhoods most friendly to African-Americans, eventually expanding its placement from the New York area to much of North America, as well as establishing a tourism company.
Many black Americans take up driving, in part to avoid segregation of public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negro people who can do that buy a car as soon as possible to be free, discriminated against, alienated and insulted." Black Americans employed as athletes, tourists, and merchants regularly traveled for employment purposes.
African-American travelers face difficulties such as white-owned businesses refusing to serve or repair their cars, being denied accommodation or eating by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forced expulsion from white people only in "big cities". Green co-authored and published The Green Book to avoid such problems, which included resources "to give the traveler the information that would keep him out of trouble, shame and to make his journey more enjoyable." The producer of the 2019 documentary film about the book gave this summary: "Everyone I interviewed talked about the community created by the Green Book: a kind of atmosphere similar to the book's design and this kind of secret road map described by the Green Book".
From the first New York-based book published in 1936, Green expanded the work to cover much of North America, including most of the United States and parts of Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. The Green Book became the "bible for the movement of blacks during the Jim Crow", allowing black travelers to find places of residence, businesses and petrol stations that would serve them along the road. It was little known outside of the African-American community. Shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which avoided the kinds of racial discrimination that made the Green Book necessary, the publication ceased and began to blossom. There was renewed interest in the early 21st century on the subject of black movement during the Jim Crow.
