By K.D. Norris
West Michigan’s Gilmore Car Museum, in promotional material for its exhibit “The Negro Motorist Green Book”, retells an often-told story about travel for African-Americans in the United State’s deep south in the middle years of the 1900s.
In the spring of 1946, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, former multi-sport standout at UCLA and a U.S. Army veteran, and his bride of two weeks were flying from Los Angeles to Florida for baseball’s spring training season — twice along the route they were bumped from flights so their seats could be occupied by passengers with white skin.
During a stopover in New Orleans, they were not allowed to eat in the “whites only” airport restaurant. After arriving in Florida, the driver ordered them to sit in the back of the bus.
But the Robinsons, Jackie — soon to wear the Brooklyn Dodgers’ No. 42 on his back — and Rachel, were not alone. African-Americans faced discrimination in many aspects of life, including lodging, dining, when trying to find a drinking fountain or a restroom or even when trying to buy gasoline for their cars.
And that era is the backdrop of the Gilmore’s exhibit “The Negro Motorist Green Book” comes into the picture — an exhibit focused on the book series “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book”.
History of the Green Book
According to supplied information, Victor Hugo Green published “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book” with a listing of places — some commercial, some private homes — where dark-skinned people could stay and eat, where they could buy gas and even which towns to avoid for their own safety.
Green, an African-American mail carrier in New York City started the series in the mid-1930s and his company kept it going until passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Green and his wife were from Virginia and as they traveled to visit family, they encountered Jim Crow Era restrictions. He got the idea to start the series when a Jewish friend showed Green a guidebook used to avoid “gentile-only” establishments and Green started his Green Book. He enlisted mail carriers across the country to help him compile and update the listings.
Decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, African Americans continued to suffer unequal treatment, especially in the Deep South. Jim Crow Laws discriminated against blacks in nearly every aspect of public life, including travel.
The Gilmore exhibit
While many people saw the Academy Award winning movie “Green Book”, visitors to the Gilmore Car Museum can now learn more about the book and its role in black travel in an exhibit which opened in 2014 and has since gained much praise.
David Lyon, automotive historian and author, recently pointed out that Gilmore’s display is likely “the only Green Book exhibit at an automobile museum in this country, and perhaps the world,” according to the Gilmore.
The exhibit includes the life-like museum figures of a mother and daughter and — the Gilmore being a car museum after all — a classic and restored two-tone 1948 Buick sedan parked at an Esso filing station. Information panels provide details, a large video plays interviews with African-Americans who experienced discrimination while traveling and a copy of the Spring 1956 edition of a Green Book is there for museum visitors to examine.
“It’s a story that had been pretty much forgotten,” Jay Follis, Gilmore museum curator, said in supplied material. “We’ve had a tremendous number of people seeing it and saying, ‘I’ve never heard of this.’”
There’s a reason the gas station in the Gilmore museum diorama has an Esso pump. Esso was a brand of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.
Follis explained that Esso had a program to help African-Americans buy and operate its service stations. Esso also provided offices and support for the staff that helped Green produce and publish his guides.
The Green Book diorama is one of two cultural exhibits that are a permanent part of the Gilmore museum’s display. The other — “The American Exodus” — focuses on the hardships of the Depression-era migration from the Midwestern “Dust Bowl” to the promised-land on the West Coast.
In addition to the Gilmore’s nearly 400 vehicles, many of them housed in historic buildings and re-created automobile dealerships, its 90-acre campus includes a vintage gasoline station and authentic 1941 Blue Moon Diner that serves lunch daily.
The Gilmore Car Museum is located at Hickory Corners, between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, for more information visit gilmorecarmusuem.org or call 269-671-5089.
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