Candacy Taylor’s “Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America,” released last month, looks at how the Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans, helped black travelers navigate segregation and create a traveling network. Sorin’s book is one of many recent works examining travel by people of color despite discrimination and threats of racial violence. Black motorists couldn’t shield their children from racist signs and announcements about the Ku Klux Klan controlling the territory they needed to pass.

In 1946, two young African American couples were pulled from their vehicle by a white mob outside of Atlanta and lynched. The car also didn’t offer full protection. “Black motorists encountered racist law-enforcement officers, racist gas-station attendants, bigoted auto repairmen, threatening road signs, and restaurants that would only serve food to black patrons through a window in the back door.” “Black drivers could venture unwittingly into the wrong neighborhoods or stop at the wrong places,” Sorin writes. Still, the new freedom also presented challenges. The free movement opened the window to migration across the land and away from Jim Crow, bring in the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Travel guides presented a modern-day Underground Railroad to show black travelers which hotels and restaurants would serve them. The car allowed African Americans to avoid segregated trains and buses throughout the American South and gave blacks a chance to travel across the country.

“Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights,” by Gretchen Sorin, is a riveting story on how the automobile opened up opportunities for blacks in the U.S.

Driving while black book