 Hi, welcome to the Future of Democracy. I'm your host, Sam Gill. This is a show where we look at the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. Think of it as kind of the op-ed page of our democracy, a place where we can unpack big ideas, big debates, and dig into them. And all month long, we have been having a series of conversations with featured authors as part of the 37th annual Miami Book Fair. And we've been talking to poets, we've been talking to journalists, we've been talking to historians about their books, their ideas, and what those ideas might mean for the future of our democracy. And again, this is a partnership with the Miami Book Fair, which is running from November 15th to 22nd. You can learn more at Miami Book Fair online.com or on Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And the really important thing to know is that the Miami Book Fair is going to be featuring a ton of free conversations with authors like Margaret Atwood, Bill Nye the Science Guy, the actress Natalie Portman. These conversations will only be free during November 15th to 22nd. So you need to go to MiamiBookFairOnline.com now or at Miami Book Fair on Twitter to see how to register and sign up and listen to some of these incredible conversations. One of the conversations that I got to have is with an author named Candice Taylor. She is an historian and wrote the book Overground Railroad, The Green Book and Roots of Black Travel in America. We were able to have a fascinating conversation about what the green book is, about the history of race in America, and about what that means for the present. I hope you enjoy the conversation. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's an honor to be here. I really appreciate it. Well, I'm really eager to dive into the book. And just first for our listeners and our viewers, what is the green book? Help us understand what this really important text in American history is. Yeah, the green book was a travel guide. It was published for black people during the Jim Crow era from 1936 to 1967. And it was really not just people called it a AAA for black folks, but it was really so much more because it was essentially a yellow pages for black businesses. Around the time when the green book started in the 1930s, there were over 70,000 black-owned businesses. So it was really a critical resource and also a life-saving tool for black travelers at that time. Talk more about the life-saving part of the tool. One of the really powerful parts of the book are the stories that you tell not just about the benefits of the guide to travel, but sometimes the stakes that black travelers continue to face in some cases in America. Yeah, I actually found the green book by accident. I kind of stumbled onto it because I was commissioned to write a travel guide on Route 66. And I'd never written a travel guide before. And my first book, Counterculture, was on the American Diner Waitress. So I had interviewed waitresses on Route 66. And I guess that's why they asked me to do it. It was a moon travel guide. And when I looked at the materials and all the books that had been written about Route 66, it was this, they were 98%, really almost all of them, say 100% of the major published books on Route 66 were by white males. And when I learned that half the counties on Route 66 were sundown towns, which were all white communities and they were all white on purpose. And if you were black, you better not be caught there after 6 p.m. And when I learned that there were thousands of sundown towns throughout the country, reading James Lowensburg's Sundown Town, his book, and connecting with him and understanding that history, I thought, well, as a black woman, how in the world did black people travel Route 66? And when I started asking that question, was how I kind of stumbled onto the green book and realizing that, you know, we talk about this time of lynching and these, you know, after reconstruction. And there's these segments in our history where there was a lot of violence and, you know, overt violence towards black folks. But this idea that the 50s and the heyday of road trips, you know, it just seemed to whitewash that reality. So I knew that I couldn't write about Route 66 without recognizing this history. And then the irony was, even though I was kind of pushing to doing this travel guide that I was kicking myself were doing, because it wasn't paying enough to really warrant, you know, I thought, why did I agree to this? Because I was under contract, I did it. And but then when I found the green book, I thought, oh, this is the project. This is the next book. So it was a blessing. A big part of the book, which is it's hard to describe for folks, there's memoir, there's history, it's multimedia, you really you get in touch with the green book and the way it evolved over time. A big part of it though is travelogue and time that you spend going to, you know, being in places that are documented. How important was that to you? It was critical, because even though I had been, I started this project in 2013. That's when I found learned about the green book. And I started, I got a couple of fellowships, I got a fellowship at the Schomburg. They have the largest number of green books, and they're digitized online. You Google NYPL, you'll see that the that they've digitized 24 editions, which is fabulous. And I got a fellowship at Harvard with at the Hutchins Center with Henry Lewis Gates. And so I done all of the scholarly, like, deep archival research, and I'd been in the archives and under, you know, almost underground for so many years. And then I got out and I drove throughout the country. And I was on the road also for years, and several trips. And once I saw the communities where these green book sites, I started scouting them. 80% of the sites are in traditional black neighborhoods. And once I saw these communities and what they look like in terms of how devastated they were in regards to the policies, like redlining or urban renewal or gentrification that today, it really shaped how I told the story and what kind of book I was going to write. So much so that even though I had sold the book proposal to Abrams, before I took those trips, when I got back and sat down to write the book, I rewrote the proposal through this other lens and said, you know, hey, I think there's another way to tell the story, not just focus on the history, but really interrogate the present in regards to this history. And when I rewrote the proposal, everybody agreed this was going to be a better book. It was a much harder book to write, but it was a better way to go. Tell us about the present. There's a striking quote at the outside of the book by, I believe, the founder of the green book, which is that it's written in anticipation of the day in which it will no longer be needed. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but that from the moment of its birth, there is sort of a hope that this will be obsolete. It sounds like you didn't quite find that. So tell us more about what you took out of the present. Yeah, you're right. That is Victor Green, the creator of the green book. He was a postal worker from Harlem. He had a seventh grade education and did this incredible thing. He was a master businessman at getting this book out there. He partnered with SO gas stations, which is ExxonMobil today. And that's how it reached so many people. But he also had this network of postal workers also soliciting for advertising. So Victor Green, yeah, he says, you know, there will come a day when we won't need this. And it really is sad because it's printed over and over and over again through the throughout the decades that the Green Book is in publication. And then Victor Green dies in 1960. So he never even lives to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And yet even after the Civil Rights Act, the book was still published, even though black people were under law able to go to any as supposedly go to any establishment. There it was still in publication until 1967. And it was taken over by his wife, Alma Green. And then she sold it to Langley Waller. And he did the last two editions. So yeah, you know, and I would argue, even today, when we look back on that time in the 60s, when there was so much change happening, and, you know, obviously, King was doing incredible things and then gets assassinated, largely right after we, you know, we have the Voting Rights Act, we have housing administration policies been put in place. And, and then Nixon comes on the scene and starts, you know, the law and order, which really is just the precursor to mass incarceration. And you can see decade by decade, every single president, regardless, whether or not the Republican or Democrat, are enacting even more stricter and harmful and devastating policies on black folks. And I would argue that Dr. King and Victor Green would be stunned at what we've been able to do since the 1960s in regards to reversing freedom and rights for black folks. So it's a real conundrum, you know, because you don't want to, you don't want to say that there hasn't been progress, because clearly there has been, but the severity of those that have not had access to that progress is far worse than anything we've seen since slavery. It really is. So, you know, the hardest thing about writing the book was because mass incarceration and the way that these policies have devastated these Green Book neighborhoods, you know, I wanted to write a book that looked chronologically at how we have that pendulum of justice has moved forward and then swung back. It's never been a linear process. So this idea when I'm doing the book and, you know, Obama is really president then, and then Trump gets in and my well-meaning white liberal friends are calling me saying, oh my god, I can't believe it's, you know, 2016 or 2018 and we're dealing with this. And it's like, well, if you really understand history and you see how things work, this makes perfect sense. This is pretty much in line with how it has gone. And so I wrote the book chronologically to show how this continues to swing back and forth. And so in 100 years, they won't be saying the same thing. Like how could we be still struggling with this? Because we haven't, we haven't really truly understood the problem enough to solve it. I mean, Black people have because they're living it, but I think now culture is really shifting its viewpoint into really trying to understand it because we are not going to get out of this until we really do make a concerted effort to right the wrongs of the past. Let me, let's, I'd love to go deeper on that, is I think, you know, because you have been working on this book for a long period of time. You had been working on it over a period of time that as you point out, spanned some moments of incredible racial optimism, I would say in this country. And obviously moments of incredible, incredible despair, maybe, maybe despair that may not, as you point out, shouldn't have been as surprising to some as it was. And then the book is, of course, coming out in a moment that combines elements of both, you know, in which a sort of a wider swath of Americans, maybe the widest swath of Americans, at least in decades, really having a very different conversation about, about race and racial justice, I think waking up to, as you document the sort of this, the translation of certain kinds of violence and intimidation across fears rather than the dissipation of those forms of intimidation and violence. Do you, how did this book inform your own view, you know, about what we need to do in this moment? There's an intense competition about what next. And, and how did, how did this particular project not only inform, but maybe change your view about what the path forward could look like? Yeah, it's a great question, because it did shift as the years passed during this, doing this research. And even if it was just that every two weeks, I had to like push back from my desk and cry and really kind of release emotionally all of this. When you, when you're focused on it in that, in that concentrated way, it really feels hopeless. Like we will never figure this out. And then to see, it made me much more vigilant. Of course, I followed and read and listened to everything Michelle Alexander who wrote the new Jim Crow, you know, and I really followed her lead in terms like it will take nothing short of a revolution to really change and to really move the needle, you know, banning chokehold laws is not going to change mass incarceration. I mean, the things that we're fighting about, and that, you know, I'm glad people are out in the streets and I'm glad that, you know, the response to the joy, George Floyd murder was really, those were moments of hope that I had, oh my gosh, okay, now enough people are really angry and they really see it. But beyond what makes real change is not what the politicians that we have are not going to do that. Regardless, and you know, I'd argue that the Democrats have done as much damage, if not more damage, especially with the crime bill for this problem. So I think really holding our elected officials responsible for this current state and what they say they want to do versus what they're going to do or what they're capable of doing, I think, you know, there needs to be real honest discussion and interrogation about that. And I think there needs to be severe consequences to the bottom line and to the sense of, you know, I think that's why revolutions happen. So I mean, I feel hopeful in the sense that there's more regular engagement and regular, it's like it's not that just another shooting happens and we go back to our regular lives. It just keeps coming up and up and up again. And I think there's a strategy to how I, you know, I think what really shifted this time was the attacking of the symbolism of what America is, you know, and that's when people thought, oh my God, I can't say I live in a free and fair society anymore. Right. And so I think that's when it's a symbol is it's same thing with Route 66. It's the same thing with anything that really pushes the ball forward in this country that we attach our hearts and minds to. It's symbolism. And so in that way, I think that's a real shift that's happened in my lifetime with the current George Floyd and all of these, you know, protests that came out during after COVID. That to me is the sliver of hope is that people will say I want to at least be proud of the country that I live in. And most folks can't do that anymore. So, you know, I'm not, I don't want to be a downer, but I do think there's, it's going to take more than just the laws and the hearts and minds of people to make this really change. And there's so many forces that were in play for so many decades for hundreds of years that are still just being enacted, but they just look slightly or slightly tweaked. So they don't look exactly the same, but they really are. You know, one thing, sort of, it's interesting to use the word revolution as I was reading the reading the book, there was one emotion I had was so how how kind of anti-revolutionary it is, like in some ways the book is about access to an American idea of liberty and its most banal form, just like the liberty of the road, the liberty of leisure, the liberty of movement for fun and for vacation and the opening of that up. And I say banal, it's obviously profound. It's about psychological safety and physical safety and all those things, but also simple. It's the simplest expression of the idea. It's not the freedom to act in high-minded ways, it's just the freedom to be, but also that in what was, in looking at the actual textual material, you know, both what was said and unsaid about how to travel safely was such a visceral portrait of what the experience of oppression and persecution really was. And so I was left with this question, which is, what are the what are the green books being written today that that are enabling black Americans to navigate so many different environments and how can we read them? You know, how can we have access to them so we can all understand? You know, that was one of my reactions to George Floyd was that I think so many more white Americans were suddenly like reading the green book of what it means to navigate an urban space when you're a black American. What's the green book of the implicit green book of navigating an employment environment and how can we come face to face with the lived reality of the kind of country, the kind of stage that we're in, as you point out in this journey, which is sort of not nearly as far as Victor Green would have hoped us to be and not nearly as far as we too often represent to be. Yeah, no, I think you're right. In terms of there was a simplicity in Victor Green's mission of just really, and it was a simple, it was a difficult and tragic situation, but he had a very simple solution, right? I mean, in the same way that Steve Jobs just put a camera in a phone and who knew that would be a revolutionary act, right? I mean, there's not, you don't have to have these huge high-minded ideals. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Sometimes history just works out that way. And I think Victor Green's solution, the simple solution, really triggered a whole network. I mean, it wasn't just black folks that were wanting to take vacation, obviously that were middle class that were using the green book, but there were all these people who were fleeing racial terror in the South. The second wave of the Great Migration was happening during this time, during the heyday of the green book's publication. And so it really served all these different types of black people. And I think today, it's interesting, when I first started the project in 2013, so many people still didn't know what the green book was. I didn't even know what the green book was. I had to ask my stepfather, Ron, I was like, is this a real thing? And he was like, oh yeah, it's real. And then we only had two editions digitized. So historians didn't even know. I think Wikipedia said there were 1,500 green book sites and I've cataloged nearly 10,000 of them because we just didn't know. We didn't know how many there were. And until the Schomburg showed, until we knew about their collection, that's how I found further research. But when I look at, at that time, people would say to me, oh my god, I can't believe such a thing ever existed. And thank god we don't need that anymore. Of course, when Obama was president. And then by 2016, people thought, oh my god, we need another green book. We need another one. And of course, there's been these variations of projects since then of green book sites or green books, people kind of co-opting the term. I mean, they're really using it in a branding way and not in a reality. I mean, because the truth is, the laws did change and technically we can go into any establishment and you may get harassed at Starbucks and there's definitely racism at acting out throughout the country as there always was and will be. So there is that. But the newer, I think to me, we don't need another green book necessarily. We need a ship and true ship in policy and access and opportunity for black people. So it's not, I mean, clearly, I've traveled around this country for, you know, I've driven like a half a million miles and I've seen more Confederate flags in upstate New York than in the whole state of South Carolina. So, you know, those, because we have a green book, a modern day green book, that's not going to change that situation. I'm still going to have to get through those towns where clearly white supremacy is ruling that place. So I think the problem is so much deeper and there's some layers. I guess I'm sort of asking like, what is the green book that exists that if we could, you know, so I guess sort of saying is like during Me Too, a discourse that had been a conceptual kind of green book for women in so many professional environments was suddenly out there for everyone to see. And it's disappointing that it was surprising to a lot of men that these were the techniques that women used to basically feel safe in their everyday lives. But some men were able to then, it brought home for them an experience that they were not acknowledging, were not recognizing, were not in touch with sort of by reading the implicit green book of women in the workplace. My hope is that what we saw were, you know, allies, overdue allies were starting to show up. And so I think of Black Twitter the same way. Like in what ways is Black Twitter a kind of green book for surviving the internet, for surviving politics and who needs to be in touch with those texts? Like my takeaway from your book was like, we all need to read the green book. Like if you really want to understand the Black experience in America historically, if you really think you, if you want to use the word ally to describe yourself, you need to read, you don't need to just read the news today, you need to go read the green book and understand this lived history. And then and then maybe right to your point, you're in a position to truly understand the depth and urgency of some of the more structural solutions we obviously need to get on with. Right. I think that's, that's, I would agree with that a hundred percent. I feel like the challenge is we can, we can mistake knowledge for true understanding. Yeah. And I think, you know, we can read, we, some of us are really well read, right? And there are people on both sides and on all sides of this issue of white supremacy, they're very intelligent and they know the facts, they know the stories. But I think the power, you know, there's a part at the end of the book that says what you can do. And it's a really short, you know, just symbolic list, I think of things to get people to think about how much we're all implicit in participating in this system. It's not that there are some people who are racist and that are creating bad policies. We are all participating in either maintaining those policies. Sometimes our 401ks are actually funding those policies. You know, so I think there's, when the George Floyd murder happened, I had so many friends calling me in tears just like, what can I do? And it's like, well, you tell me, you know, what can you do? Everybody has some, it's like, do you have a business or a rental property? Is there a felony box question on that application? Take it off. There are things that we all have access and power to, especially white people who can make those, you know, you think it's not effectual, but it really is. Like there are so many, you know, I think in terms of when you look at something like Tulsa and the, you know, the race, the race massacre that, and all those black owned businesses and all the empowerment of that, you know, that's really, I think, who we are. And in terms of black community, when you look historically at what we've been able to accomplish despite the odds and despite everything that's been in front of us, it's not so much that we need quote unquote help from white America. We need access to the same opportunities. And then for them to get out of our way, when we do our thing, when we enact our own businesses and have our own, you know, that to me is really the bigger challenge. It's not so much we haven't been capable of doing it. It's just that when we have, we've been either, you know, forwarded or stopped or killed or, you know, there have been major forces against us. So just remove those forces and we'll be fine. But I think it's, it's a challenge that falls into this trope of, again, the white savior complex of like, what can we do to help the problem? And it's like, well, you know, not that everybody is against us or in our way, but it, but there are certain things that we can do collectively as a culture, both black and white. There's plenty of black people who are, you know, who are not, who are also participating in the system. We're all victims of white supremacy in that way. You know, so to really rise above that and learn how to stop being a part of that process, I think is the first step. So I want to get you out of here on one last question. And it's, it's a, it's a version of the what should one do question, what you address in your book. But I want to ask it a little differently, which is the, you know, America has all these kinds of ur sites for its democracy, you know, you should go to Gettysburg, you should go to this place or that place to sort of be in touch with whatever this mythos is of American democracy. So my question to you is, where should one go? If you had to pick one site that you visited in the Green Book, where's one place that Americans who are committed to a different vision should go? That's so hard. It's like picking your favorite child and I don't have children, but you know, still it's like, because in so many different stages of the project, I've fallen in love with certain sites. I mean, I have an exhibition that just launched last week with the Smithsonian. I was a curator and content specialist for this exhibition. It's called the Negro Motorist Green Book. And so we actually have artifacts that I found in some of these Green Book sites. The reality is only 3% approximately of these sites are actually still operating, lost so many of them. And preservation to me is really important to a project with the National Park Service, preserving some of these sites. And I want to do a rehabbing project as well, probably in combination with the National Trust, who I'm also working with, to rehab some of these sites and bring them back to life. But the ones that are still standing and operating, I mean, there's some really great ones. And I have a site tour at the end of the book where people can actually look. But the Dunbar comes to mind. It's an old Spanish colonial building in LA in the South Central District. And it's just when you walk in, I mean, there's this huge atrium and beautiful architecture and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington used to hang out there. And there was so much and the piano that they played is, you know, they still have it on site. There is a piano in that main lobby that I believe was put in after the 70s. But it's just a really historic and beautiful space. And there's a restaurant downstairs now that they just opened that, you know, so you can actually go and have a meal. I think that's great. There's also Clifton's, which is also in LA, which is kind of five-story cafeteria that's just odd and fascinating and family Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney used to hang out there and David Lynch, you know, used to love to go there and maybe still does. But there's those kinds of places. There's also the Lorraine Motel, which is where the opening for the exhibition is. It's the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. That was where King was assassinated. But it was also Green Book listing the Lorraine Motel. So there's all these different ways to kind of engage his history and learn about these places. So definitely look at the back of the book in the site tour and it kind of give you something maybe, hopefully, that's close nearby to you since we're not really traveling much these days. Well, the author is Candice Taylor. The book is Overground Railroad, the Green Book and Roots of Black Travel in America. You can follow Candice on Twitter at CandiceTaylor and her website is www.TaylorMadeCulture.com. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Sam. It was wonderful. I appreciate the interview. All right, folks. Every single one of these conversations is going to be released leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair. It runs from November 15 to 22nd. Every conversation is free during that period. Check out MiamiBookFair.com or go to Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And remember, the future of democracy runs every Thursday live at 1pm Eastern. You can learn more at kf.org slash fdshow. You can also follow the FD podcast at Spotify, Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you follow podcasts. That's also where we'll be releasing every single one of these exclusive conversations in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. And of course, feel free to send a question at any time to me on Twitter at the Sam Gill. Thanks so much for listening.