The 'Negro Motorist Green Book' (1936-1967)

[TokyoBayer]

Looking at one from 1950, it looks like there was a listing for one hotel in Salt Lake City.

Utah Hotel, owned by the LDS church, was discriminating against blacks until the 1960s.

Before World War II, a French Black singer, Lillian Yvanti, stayed with the Frank Johnsons while in Salt Lake City because she was denied rooms in leading hotels in town. During the 1940s and 1950s similar incidents continued. Marian Anderson, famed concert singer, was allowed to stay at Hotel Utah on condition that she used the freight elevator. Harry Belafonte was also refused rooms at Hotel Utah but was accepted at the Hotel Newhouse which had previously barred Blacks. Ella Fitzgerald and her entourage were placed in a Black hotel on the west side of Salt Lake City because no white hotel would take them. To avoid embarrassment, pianist Lionel Hampton’s wife used the ploy of asking local sponsors to find a hotel for them that would take her two small dogs.

. . .

Providing entertainers with first-class accommodations had to wait until the state and federal legislation of the 1960s.

I just saw the movie last week, and had to explain it to my Taiwanese friend.

Coincidentally, my student is reading a book about Louis Armstrong and it mentions some of the segregation at the time. It’s very foreign to them.

[jasg]

The Atlantic has a new article about a documentary from the Smithsonian.

The Documentary Highlighting the Real Green Book

A new Smithsonian film positions the guidebook for black travelers as a necessary response to white-supremacist violence—and as a community-building tool.

[Quartz]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Yup. Plenty of good ol’ boys who went overseas to fight in one or the other of the World Wars, and came back just as much bigoted assholes as ever.

There was an incident where black American troops were drinking in a British pub with British soldiers when white American troops arrived and took umbrage. A fight broke out and the British sided with the blacks.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Quartz

There was an incident where black American troops were drinking in a British pub with British soldiers when white American troops arrived and took umbrage. A fight broke out and the British sided with the blacks.

Good on them! There were recorded examples during WWII of Wehrmacht prisoners in the South being treated more politely than black U.S. servicemen, too. Shameful.

[TokyoBayer]

I went back to Utah last year and we visited the Topaz internment camp for Japanese Americans. They have a nice museum there in town. My grandfather taught school in the camp so my mother and her family lived there for a year.

The husband of my cousin was trying to argue that wasn’t racism.

Attempts to whitewash (ha!) racism in America, past and present, are so tiring.

[Alessan]

@nearwildheaven

A while back, I read a self-published book by a white Midwestern man who contracted polio shortly before the vaccine came out in the early 1950s, and after he recovered from the disease itself, he and his father went to the center in Warm Springs, GA for further therapy. En route, they stopped at some place that had a public restroom and two black men in the facility were looking at them oddly; they assumed it was because of his wheelchair until they exited the restroom and saw the “COLORED” sign on the door. They hadn’t noticed, nor would they have cared; all they saw was the “MEN” part of the sign.

Also a while back, we were talking about these books on another website, and one poster said that s/he wondered how many white people purchased them while traveling, so they would only patronize establishments where everyone was welcome.

For what it’s worth, my father (born 1948) remembers taking a trip down south in the mid-50’s, and my grandfather insisting that they all drink from the “Colored” water fountains. I don’t know if anyone challenged them, I think but my grandfather - a pugnacious Brooklynite who’d experience his own fair share of discrimination - would have welcomed the conflict.

[DesertDog]

@TokyoBayer

The husband of my cousin was trying to argue that wasn’t racism.

Attempts to whitewash (ha!) racism in America, past and present, are so tiring.

Oh, no, of course it wasn’t racism. He could point to all the camps where the Italian-Americans and German-Americans were interred that pepper the landscape and the camps in Hawaii where the Japanese – much greater in percentage than in California – in that state were locked away.

[snoe]

If you like Lovecraft pastiches, check out the recent novel Lovecraft Country. The plot MacGuffin is that it’s time to research the new edition of the (lightly fictionalized) Green Book, so our 1950s heroes have to drive through a lot of rural backwaters, where they encounter eldritch abominations (and human ones, too).

Ruff’s original idea was a “monster-of-the-week”-type TV show with black characters in the 1950s, and the Green Book provided an excellent reason for them to go have some adventures. HBO is now turning the book into a show.

[GuanoLad]

Oh, this is why that movie is called Green Book.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@GuanoLad

Oh, this is why that movie is called Green Book.

See post 4. It won two Oscars last night, too: List of accolades received by Green Book - Wikipedia

[Dewey_Finn]

Three Oscars, actually. Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (for Mahershala Ali) and Best Original Screenplay.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Right you are.

This recent *NYT *essay might also be of interest: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/green-book-black-travel.html

[Miller]

@Balance

Just in case it’s not obvious, that’s a parody, drawn by a cartoonist who made a career out of caricatures. You can read the interview the image appears in for yourself, if you like, but he comes across as a hack trying to justify himself to me.

Thanks for clearing up that that comic strip was not, in fact, an episode of a live-action television show.

[Balance]

@Miller

Thanks for clearing up that that comic strip was not, in fact, an episode of a live-action television show.

Snark acknowledged. I was well aware that Elendil’s Heir was joking, but I pointed out the source because it’s possible someone could think there was a comic-strip spinoff of the show. (There were a couple of issues of an authorized “Andy Griffith Show” comic book, after all.) Almost certainly unnecessary, but I wanted to head off anyone who’s really bad at recognizing parody.