How Blacks Navigated Sundown Towns

Thanks to country musician, Jason Aldean, and his new song - Try That In A Small Town - there has been a lot of talk about sundown towns in the past few weeks, sparked mainly by clips of the video that have been circulating on social media reflecting images of demonstrators at a courthouse that was the site of the famous lynching of a Black man in 1920.

Living in South Louisiana, I’ve heard about sundown towns all my life. Trust me when I tell you, one thing Black people don’t play about is being in the wrong place after dark.

So what exactly is a Sundown town? A Sundown town is a place where white people are very upfront about racism and their dislike for Black people, so much so that terrible things have been known to happen if you’re caught in these parts after dark. Yes, the presence of Blacks was (and still is) banned after dark.

Before the internet and Google maps became available, Blacks used a travel guide to help them navigate around sundown towns. This guide was called The Negro Motorist Green-Book, or simply The Green Book, which was first published in 1936 during segregation and the Jim Crow era in the South by Victor Hugo Green, a Black postman who lived in Harlem.

The first guide consisted of fifteen pages that listed establishments in New York City that welcomed Black patrons such as restaurants, hotels, gas stations, beauty salons, nightclubs, tailors, liquor stores, barbershops, garages, and drugstores. Green modeled the publication from ones he saw for Jewish travelers that appeared in Jewish newspapers at the time.

Demand for the travel guide grew quickly and by the time of the second publication in 1937, Green shifted his focus to travel throughout the United States for Black people. To make this happen, he utilized connections he made through the National Association of Letter Carriers, reaching out to postmen across the nation.

The Green Book helped to make travel safe for Black Americans until it ceased publication in 1967, two years before I was born.

Click here to purchase a copy of The Negro Motorist Green-Book.

This article may contain affiliate links in which the author will be compensated a small fee, paid by the advertiser, if used by the reader.