Traveling While Black
The Green Book was a critical guide for African-Americans struggling to travel safely in the Jim Crow era. This 360 degree video explores its complicated legacy.

This film offers a revealing view of the Green Book era as told through Ben’s Chili Bowl, a black-owned restaurant in Washington, and reminds us that the humiliations heaped upon African-Americans during that time period.

Sandra Butler-Truesdale, born in the capital in the 1930s, references an often-forgotten trauma—and one of the conceptual underpinnings of the Jim Crow era—when she recalls that Negroes who shopped in major stores were not allowed to try on clothing before they bought it. Store owners at the time offered a variety of racist rationales, including that Negroes were insufficiently clean. At bottom, the practice reflected the irrational belief that anything coming in contact with African-American skin — including clothing, silverware or bed linens — was contaminated by blackness, rendering it unfit for use by whites.