![]() ![]() And once it’s there, that surprising revelation is completely transformative. But I’ll say, the incredible thing about this topic, this whole area, is a surprise for non-African-American Americans.īecause what dawns on you is that there’s a reality that you never really understood existed. We’re right in kind of the first phases of it, just beginning filming it. What were some of the unexpected discoveries that you’ve made with sources? What were some of your surprises during the time that you’ve been excavating this? Where you kind of go, “Well, there’s the Civil War and then there’s something called Reconstruction, maybe Jim Crow means something to people, but really what’s something that organizes credibly and resonantly, the experience of race in America in the 1920s down through the Civil Rights Movement?” is an opportunity to fill in a blank spot on the inner map of America. ![]() As soon as there was a car, there was that agency, but there was also those challenges. All of which we are so deeply intimately in the homeliest way, associated with the American experience. How are you going to get to the hospital? What hospital will take you? I mean, this whole inventory of experience. What happens when your car breaks down? What happens when you need to get gas? What happens when your four-year-old needs to go to the bathroom? Where are you going to eat? Where are you going to sleep? God forbid something should happen like a car accident, a medical emergency. Now you as a black person are crossing white space. You go where you want, when you want.īut for black Americans, suddenly, the whole question of mobility and race in America is a huge powder keg. You’re not dependent on somebody else’s timetable or schedule. We’re making a film called “Driving While Black,” which is covering this period when suddenly the automobile dawns for black Americans as it does for all Americans. The black is soil, the white is people.” You’re having a different experience in the family car. It just unfolded in a completely different way, so as you’re driving into Greenville, Texas, across whose main street the banner reads, “Greenville, Texas. And what non-African-American Americans don’t know is that that story has a completely different cast to it. It’s part of the inner imaginary of America. You know, all those things like the old Esso sign, motels, Howard Johnson’s. I was born in 1955, so anybody who’s got roots through their own life or their parents or their grandparents, during the era when America became a car culture. And she just really sort of made it her own, did oral histories, went to many of the places, has collected over a couple of decades an amazing archive of material.Īnd what drew you to the Green Book project? And she approached me some time ago and said, “Let’s do a film about this.” And there’s nobody who knows more about the Green Book than her. How did you encounter the Green Book originally?Ī colleague of mine named Gretchen Sorin, who runs a Cooperstown Museum institute, is an extraordinary historian who did her dissertation on the Green Book decades ago. Burns is exploring the Green Book as a window into history, and into the present, where the experience of driving while black is again at the center of our national conversation. I spoke with Burns about what he’s learned so far in making this film. The Green Book is also the subject of filmmaker Ric Burns’s forthcoming documentary. Today, it is a potent artifact of discrimination. ![]() For those who relied on it, it amounted to an essential safety precaution. For blacks denied access to restaurants, hotels and restrooms-and who often risked even greater danger if they were driving after dark-it was an essential resource, listing hundreds of establishments, across the South and the nation, that welcomed African-Americans.īefore the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation, the Green Book sold in the millions and was passed from family member to family member. Visionary publisher-entrepreneur Victor Green, a Harlem postal carrier, introduced the travel guide in 1937. The Green Book often functioned as a lifesaver. For African-American travelers in the Jim Crow-era South-often journeying from the north to visit relatives who had not joined the Great Migration-an unprepossessing paper-bound travel guide often amounted to a survival kit. ![]()
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