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“Please Mention the Green Book:” The Negro Motorist Green Book as Critical GIS

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Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis

Part of the book series: Historical Geography and Geosciences ((HIGEGE))

Abstract

The Green Book, a Jim Crow era travel guide created by African-Americans for African-Americans, has received much recent popular and academic scrutiny. Consisting of almost 30 editions published between 1936 and 1966, the Green Book features thousands of addresses for businesses that catered to African-Americans during a period of institutionalized discrimination and segregation. Use of the guide allowed for safe travel by black travelers through hostile areas of the United States as it provided escape from harassment and potential violence instigated by unwelcoming shopkeepers and patrons. As a tool of resistance developed to spatially subvert white supremacy, the many editions of the Green Book provide a kind of road map that can reveal black geographies previously forgotten by hegemonic knowledge structures. However, despite this recognized social and historical importance, few studies have investigated the spatial data contained within the pages of the guidebook, or more broadly, the spaces of black geographies. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by understanding how the text of the Green Book can be read through the epistemologies of black geographies and critical geographic information science (GIS). Simultaneously, it provides insights into the geography of African-American travel patterns during an era of state-sponsored discrimination. This study embraces technological advances since the time of the Green Book’s publication to visually map spatial data published during the Jim Crow era to demonstrate how the study of black geographies may benefit from the use of critical GIS and texts such as the Green Book. Using a case study of New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), the author shows how the Green Book can be read to reveal how shifts in American racial politics, from overt segregation in the 1930s to racial liberalization in the 1960s, led to shifts in the spaces associated with African-American travel. By comparing the spatial data of the Green Book to historical census data, trends in urban neighborhood composition can explain how and why African-American travel patterns shifted within the case city. Furthermore, such mapping reveals the complex networks of spaces developed by black Americans to live within a segregationist society while actively resisting discrimination through the construction of counter-public spaces. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how historical texts, including guidebooks, can be used to provide insights into the historical geography of a largely understudied population, African-American travelers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Alexander, M. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

  2. 2.

    Loewen, J.W. 2005. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: The New Press.

  3. 3.

    Wilkerson, I. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 208–209.

  5. 5.

    For examples of formal resistance, see McKnight, G.D. 1998. The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Boulder: Westview Press; and Arsenault, R. 2006. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. For examples of informal resistance, see Alderman, D.H. and Inwood, J. 2016. Mobility as Antiracism Work: The “Hard Driving” of NASCAR’s Wendell Scott. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106:3, 597–611.

  6. 6.

    Inwood, J.F.J. 2011. Constructing African American Urban Space in Atlanta, Georgia. The Geographical Review 101:2, 147–163.

  7. 7.

    Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns, 204.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 204.

  9. 9.

    Hall, D. (Producer). 2016, February 23. Episode 201: The Green Book. 99% Invisible [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from https://99percentinvisible.org; Staples, B. 2019, January 25. The Green Book’s Black History: Lessons from the Jim Crow-era Travel Guide for African-American Elites. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/green-book-black-travel.html.

  10. 10.

    Hall, M.R. 2014. The Negro Traveller’s Guide to a Jim Crow South: Negotiating Racialized Landscapes During a Dark Period in the United States Cultural History, 1936–1967. Postcolonial Studies 17:3, 307–319; Mitchell, J.T. and Collins, L. 2014. The Green Book: “Safe Spaces” from Place to Place. The Geography Teacher 11:1, 29–36; Alderman, D.H. and Inwood, J. 2016. Civil Rights as Geospatial Work: Rethinking African-American Resistance. In Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, 3rd Edition, eds. J.W. Frazier, E.L. Tettey-Fio, and N.F. Henry, 177–185. Albany: SUNY Press.

  11. 11.

    Schuurman, N. 1999. Critical GIS: Theorizing an Emerging Science. Cartographica 36: 1–108; Pavlovskaya, M. 2006. Theorizing with GIS: A Tool for Critical Geographies? Environment and Planning A 38: 2003–2020.

  12. 12.

    Block, J.P., Scribner, R.A., and DeSalvo, K.B. 2004. Fast Food, Race/Ethnicity, and Income: A Geographic Analysis. American Journal of Preventative Medicine 27:3, 211–217; Sharma, M. 2017. Income Divide and Race/Ethnicity in Tennessee Metropolises. International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research 4:1, 1–23.

  13. 13.

    McKittrick, K. and Woods, C. 2007. “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean.” In Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. K. McKittrick and C. Woods. Toronto: Between the Lines, 6.

  14. 14.

    McKittrick, K. 2007. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xv.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 12–13.

  16. 16.

    Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell.

  17. 17.

    McKittrick and Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries”, 6.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 7.

  19. 19.

    Elwood, S. 2008. Volunteered Geographic Information: Future Research Directions Motivated by Critical, Participatory, and Feminist GIS. GeoJournal 72:3/4, 177.

  20. 20.

    Kwan, M-P. 2002. Is GIS for Women? Reflections on the Critical Discourse in the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture 9:3, 271–279; Gilbert, M.R. and Masucci, M. 2006. The Implications of Including Women’s Daily Lives in a Feminist GIScience. Transactions in GIS 10:5, 751–761; Pavlovskaya, Theorizing with GIS.

  21. 21.

    McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; McKittrick and Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries”; Pacheco, D. and Velez, V.N. 2009. Maps, Mapmaking, and Critical Pedagogy: Exploring GIS and Maps as a Teaching Tool for Social Change. Seattle Journal for Social Justice 8:1, 273–302; Tate IV, W.F. and Hogrebe, M. 2011. From Visuals to Vision: Using GIS to Inform Civic Dialogue About African American Males. Race Ethnicity and Education 14:1, 51–71.

  22. 22.

    McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies.

  23. 23.

    Allen, D., Lawhon, M. and Pierce, J. 2018. Placing Race: On the Resonance of Place with Black Geographies. Progress in Human Geography: 2.

  24. 24.

    Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns.

  25. 25.

    Franz, K. 2004. ‘The Open Road’: Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years. In Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study, ed. B. Sinclair. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 131-154; Seiler, C. 2006. “So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By”: African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism. American Quarterly 58:4, 1091–1117.

  26. 26.

    Foster, M.S. 1999. In the Face of “Jim Crow”: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890–1945. The Journal of Negro History 84: 130.

  27. 27.

    Alderman and Inwood, Mobility as Antiracism Work.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 602.

  29. 29.

    Foster, In the Face of “Jim Crow”, 136.

  30. 30.

    Algeo, K. 2013. Underground Tourists/Tourists Underground: African American Tourism to Mammoth Cave. Tourism Geographies 15:3, 380–404.

  31. 31.

    Ibid.

  32. 32.

    Inwood, J. 2014. The Great Migration. In North American Odyssey: Historical Geographies for the Twenty-first Century, eds. C.E. Colten and G.L. Buckley. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 103–115.

  33. 33.

    Alderman and Inwood, Civil Rights as Geospatial Work.

  34. 34.

    Stanonis, A.J. 2006. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918–1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press; Gotham, K.F. 2007. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy. New York: New York University Press.

  35. 35.

    Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy, 196.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 213.

  37. 37.

    Campanella, R. 2017. Cityscapes of New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 23–31.

  38. 38.

    Paquette, R.L. 2009. “A Horde of Brigands?” The Great Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 Reconsidered. Historical Reflections 35:1, 72–96.

  39. 39.

    Blassingame, J.W. 1973. Black New Orleans, 1860-1880. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 189–190.

  40. 40.

    Inwood, The Great Migration, 111; Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy, 198–212.

  41. 41.

    Green, V.H., ed. 1938. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1938 Edition. New York: Victor H. Green & Co, Introduction.

  42. 42.

    Green, V.H., ed. 1954. The Negro Traveler’s Green Book: 1954. New York: Victor H. Green & Co, 5.

  43. 43.

    McKittrick and Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries”, 7.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Ethan Bottone

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  1. Ethan Bottone
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Correspondence to Ethan Bottone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA

    Charles Travis

  2. Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Francis Ludlow

  3. Department of Regional Science, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Gyuris

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Bottone, E. (2020). “Please Mention the Green Book:” The Negro Motorist Green Book as Critical GIS. In: Travis, C., Ludlow, F., Gyuris, F. (eds) Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis. Historical Geography and Geosciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37569-0_4

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