My memories of traveling around the South in the 1950s look a lot like ‘Green Book’ | Perspective

When I was kid in the 1950s, my family and I traveled all over the South. The ’56 Chevy held the dust from every highway from Georgia to Texas. Long before the completion of the U.S. network of interstate highways, clean rest stops, and plentiful eateries, black families like ours would learn to navigate an often-segregated, hostile route that would carry them frequently into “enemy territory.”

Perhaps that is why I especially enjoyed the movie Green Book. Of course I’ve heard the controversies from the family of Dr. Don Shirley, the classically trained musician portrayed by Mahershala Ali. They say they were never consulted for the movie. That’s surprising, but the story line as delivered about Shirley’s travels in the South with his white driver, played by Viggo Mortensen, garnered the film numerous awards including the Oscar for best picture.

My husband and business partner patterned our publication, Pathfinders Travel Magazine for People of Color, after the original Negro Motorist Green Book, published between 1936 and 1966, as a travel guide for African Americans. In 1997, when we founded Pathfinders, the Travel Industry of America had recently released a study on minority travel. According to research, black people travel in groups more than any other people and when traveling they would stay longer to enjoy events, sites, or restaurants relevant to their culture.

But I can attest from my family’s own experiences, the underlying thought was often “Will I really feel welcomed here?”

During the late ’50s and early ’60s, our family of five -- my parents, brother, sister, and I -- moved every summer as Daddy received military orders for transfer to another base. My mother, Eunice Johnson, 86, said he would spread the maps for each state on the floor and study them, plotting where the family could safely overnight at a military base along the way. More often than not, the route would include a series of black-owned boardinghouses, homes of friends of friends, or dinner in the kitchen of a known woman who simply sold meals from her kitchen.

“He could drive for hours and hours,” my mother said. “We would leave at the crack of dawn and make sure we were never caught alone on the highway at night.”

We never took summer family vacations. Moving was our summer trip, though at times we would stop and visit sights such as the monument to George Washington Carver in Missouri. Often, those journeys detoured to my grandparents’ home in Gadsden, Ala., if we were moving from Washington, D.C., to Arkansas or Georgia to Missouri.

It would be early in the morning when the smell of fried chicken would awaken us, a clue we would soon be departing. Grandmother would fry the chicken, put it on Wonder Bread, and then carefully place it in a shoe box with sliced homemade pound cake. I later learned the shoe box would keep the cake and bread from getting smashed. I learned also that this was a way of ensuring we could eat during what were often eight- or nine-hour car trips since we couldn’t stop at restaurants.

As children we were often protected from many of the horrors or idiosyncrasies of segregation. We grew up happily in a black community that included professionals, laborers, washerwomen, and, in Mississippi, with children whose parents picked cotton for a living. By the time the daily news reporting of water hoses, church bombings, and civil rights marches occurred, we were tucked in an Air Force base in Japan and our attention was turned more to the casualties of the Vietnam War and the deployment of fathers to combat areas.

But there are childhood memories of not being able to use a swimming pool at the Howard Johnson Inn. Our parents said, “No, we can’t stop,” and we believed it was more due to a sense of urgency than realizing it was because of segregation.

My mother has plenty of memories of traveling through the South.

“I don’t remember a Green Book per se,” she said. “But somehow we would find out where to stay and eat. There was a network that existed. Occasionally, though, the family did face the indignities of segregated travel.”

“We were running low on gas and parked on the gas station parking lot, where we slept in the car until the station opened the next morning,” Mom said. “When the people came to open the gas station, they knocked on the window and woke us up.”

Another incident occurred while traveling through West Memphis, Ark., where my father tried to buy my brother and me some ice cream. The owner told Daddy to go to the back to be served. But rather than face that humiliation, he got back in the car and pulled off, the rocks and dust spewing from the spinning tires.

Roadside stops to use the bathroom were met with giggles of doing something we would never have been allowed to do otherwise.

Though the movie may have embellished certain scenes, as a story depicting traveling through the segregated America, Green Book, unfortunately, was historically accurate.

P.J. and Weller Thomas founded Pathfinders Travel Magazine for People of Color in 1997. The magazine tells readers where to go, where to dine, and how to get there from a unique, cultural perspective. www.pathfinderstravel.com