Mapping the Green Book | National Geographic

[Music] Most of us have good hearts, and most people want everybody to just have a fair and equal life in this country. But there was always kind of a disconnect, and there still is, in terms of understanding how our history is so close to us. It's so important that we honor this history but also learn from it.

My name is Candace Taylor. I'm a cultural documentarian working on a project based on the Green Book, which was a travel guide that was published for Black people during the Jim Crow era. It serviced not only Black migrants who were leaving the South during the second wave of the Great Migration but also Black entrepreneurs, celebrities, and all kinds of folks who just wanted to take vacation like every other American. By 1962, two million people were using the Green Book. It was the Bible of Black travel, and that largely speaks to just how critical it was for safety.

For instance, the sundown town was a place that was all white on purpose, and if you were Black, you were not allowed after 6 PM. When I first started this project, I kept reading about this chauffeur's hat that Black people would pretend to wear to help them get out of situations with law enforcement. I asked my stepdad one day, "Is this true?" and he said, "Yeah." He said it happened to him when he was a child riding in the back seat of his parents' car. Then they got pulled over by a sheriff, and his father turned and looked at him. He said, "Don't say a word."

The sheriff said, "Who are these people? Whose car is this? Where are you going?" Ron's father said, "This is my employer's car." He turned to his wife and said, "She's the maid and this is her son, and I'm driving them home." The sheriff, you know, kind of balked and said, "Well, where's your hat?" and he said, "It's hanging in the back, officer."

So there were props, there were ruses, tools that you had to use to stay safe and stay alive, and the Green Book was just simply another one of those tools. I'm creating an interactive map that shows not only Green Book sites but sundown towns, socioeconomic statistics like lead poisoning or educational disparities or income disparities, or private prisons. The map is such a critical tool in telling the story because there's so much data.

There were about 10,000 businesses listed in the Green Book, and I've scouted over 4,000 sites. I've estimated that about eighty percent of the buildings have been just erased from the landscape, and less than three percent are still operating. But L.A. has either the largest or the second largest number that are still standing.

We're sitting in the Dunbar, and it was built by a man who was a Black dentist. He was sick of being thrown out of hotels, so he thought, "Well, just build my own." Doctor, how are you? Welcome to the Dunbar. Thank you. That is it. The Dunbar was called the Waldorf Astoria of Black America; the best of the best. This is a piece of history. You can see this quote here: it was a hotel, a jewel done with loving hands.

Funny that a hotel so impressive was so unexpected, so startling, so beautiful. W.E.B. Du Bois. That's right, incredible. It is incredible. Before you know, Billie Holiday, of course, great singer, Duke Ellington, this was the hub of L.A. Black culture back in the 30s and 40s. This was the place to be.

It's really critical to understand what these places look like today and how racism has shaped how we move, especially as Black people, through this country—where we stay and how we live. So this is the raw data of my working map. Let's look at where we are now in Los Angeles and see what happens when we zoom in the Dunbar, for example. When the interactive map is completed, you'll see images from the Dunbar, historical and current.

Oh my gosh, so all of this is Dunbar? Yeah, this is incredible that we have these artifacts because there's so few Green Book sites that are even still here. Right, the fact that it's not all lost. God, when I get to a Green Book site, first of all, I want to see if it's still there. I'll try and find the owner, and then I go and I do interviews.

I've interviewed a man who worked in a Green Book site in Montgomery, Alabama, called the Ben Moore Hotel, and he was Martin Luther King's barber. At that time, the strategy for the Montgomery Bus Boycott was happening, and so all those conversations with Thurgood Marshall and all of these people who were on the front lines of this history were sitting in that barber shop. So it's a real honor, not just that the buildings are here, but to try and capture the stories behind them.

So the Green Bookmark that I'm developing is including both historical and current data regarding race and mobility and access to equality. The swastikas are KKK and other hate groups from the 2015 census, so that brings it into today. Being able to visualize data really helps tell the story of not just the Green Book, but of our current situation with race and class in America today.

Digital data can just change our lives. I'm working on an augmented reality platform and a mobile app to actually scan, so you can see what was there, what it looked like when it was in the Green Book, kind of collapsing the present and the past into a story. Because I think that's been important to me, that people don't look at the Green Book and say, "Oh my gosh, that's something that happened in the past, and thank God we don't need that anymore."

It's important that we learn the real history of what the Green Book was, how it really transformed access and mobility for a race of people. It gave them the strength to persevere in spite of all the challenges that were ahead of them. This guide made it possible for them to move forward anyway. It was extremely powerful. [Music]