Brent Staples

The two white women depicted in sculpture — Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony — played influential roles in the 19th-century struggle for women’s suffrage. But the duo also represented a classist and often racist faction of the movement that declined to accept African-Americans as equals.

Stanton invoked white supremacist slanders when she opposed the 15th Amendment — which ostensibly granted black men the right to vote — casting men of color as “Sambos,” tyrants and incipient rapists. She and Anthony compounded that offense by rendering black suffragists nearly invisible in “History of Woman Suffrage,” the multivolume history that still dominates popular thinking on the early women’s rights struggle.

It would repeat that insult to feature these two women alone in Central Park’s first suffrage monument. To do so would also make the city seem willfully blind to the work of black women who served at the vanguard of the fight for universal rights — and whose achievements have already shaped suffrage monuments in other cities.

New York’s Black Suffragists

Black women faced pervasive racism and gender discrimination at the same time and did not have the option of concentrating solely on women’s voting rights. As historian Susan Goodier has written, these women “wove agitation for the vote into their activism for civil rights, moral reform and community improvement.” Through this pattern, the suffrage agenda suffused the black clubwomen’s movement that flourished beginning in the late-19th century.

Educator and activist Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet, who in 1863 became the first black principal of a New York City public school, was ubiquitous in this movement and is more than worthy of inclusion in a monument. Garnet argued that women had “the same human intellectual and spiritual capabilities as men,” making it undemocratic to deny them the vote. During the 1880s, she and her younger sister Susan Maria McKinney Steward — the first black female doctor to practice in New York state — joined with others to organize the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn.

The league, which hosted a lively forum for speakers, moved to a YMCA when it outgrew its initial meeting space in Garnet’s home. She affiliated the league with the National Association of Colored Women, where she became leader of the group’s suffrage department. When anti-lynching campaigner — and soon-to-be suffragist — Ida B. Wells was run out of the South in 1892 for writing candidly about lynch mobs, Garnet and her friends joined together in yet another organization to promote Wells’s anti-lynching work.

Iconic suffragist Sojourner Truth should have been a shoo-in for the Central Park monument. She was born enslaved in Ulster County, New York, and grew up to become a celebrated abolitionist and suffragist orator and one of the genuinely heroic figures of the 19th century. As historian Martha Jones writes in a scalding critique of the Central Park monument decision, Truth was a pioneer in the suffrage movement and attended the first national women’s rights conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850 — “a year in which Cady Stanton remained at home and Anthony was altogether absent, yet to be enticed by Stanton to join in.” Beyond that, Jones writes, her life stood “for a vision of women’s rights free of racism and inclusive of those, like her, who began their lives enslaved and well beyond the bounds of the body politic.”

African-American activist and intellectual Fannie Barrier Williams is also worthy of inclusion. She was born into a privileged free black family in 1855 in the liberal and mainly white community of Brockport, New York, where she was shielded from vicious racism. That changed when she went to work as a teacher in the South, where she witnessed the hardships visited upon formerly enslaved African-Americans.

After settling in Chicago, the charismatic Barrier Williams built a national reputation as a champion of both African-American and women’s rights. At a time when black women were often shunned by white suffragists, she pursued fruitful interracial alliances through churches and social clubs, enlisting white liberals in the effort to break down barriers to employment for African-American women.

Blackness Made Visible

An earlier version of the Central Park sculpture, unveiled last year, depicted Stanton and Anthony looming over a long scroll on which were inscribed the names of nearly two dozen suffragists, several of them black women; it seemed to show Stanton writing those women into existence.

The scroll is mercifully absent from the design that the city’s public art design agency approved in March. But without a reference to the many women who led and labored in the movement, the Central Park monument has become even more about lionizing two white women.

Tennessee is taking a more inclusive approach. The Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument unveiled in Nashville three years ago honors five suffragists who were present in the state during the run-up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. The amendment barred states from denying voting rights on account of sex. Among those suffragists are the internationally known suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt, who succeeded Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and African-American Tennessean J. Frankie Pierce, who addressed a state suffrage convention at the capitol at the height of the 19th Amendment battle.

The Memphis Suffrage Monument, scheduled to be unveiled in August, honors 13 people. Among the five African-Americans included are Ida B. Wells and civil rights and women’s rights leader Mary Church Terrell, both of whom suffered racist treatment at the hands of white women in the suffrage movement. At the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, for example, Wells and Terrell were outraged when white suffrage leaders asked them to march with a colored delegation at the rear of the parade. By including them in the Memphis monument, the sponsors acknowledge a poisonous aspect of the movement that is often glossed over.

The Memphis monument also includes a white male — early-20th-century state legislator Joseph Hanover, who led the successful floor fight for ratification of the 19th Amendment. And the monument interweaves late-19th- and early-20th-century personalities with women from subsequent generations who carried on the suffrage dream through civic action or by holding elected office. This cross-generational feature offers a welcome view of how the suffrage movement propelled women forward over time.

Monument makers in Minnesota took care not to limit the suffrage memorial built in St. Paul two decades ago to the upper-class white women who were easiest to identify. As Heidi Bauer wrote at the time for the Upper Midwest Women’s History Center, “The woman suffrage movement attracted people from all walks of life and united them in a way that no other cause or measure had previously done.”

With a little extra effort, researchers came up with a broad selection of 25 women whose names were recorded at the memorial in St. Paul. Among them are schoolteachers like Harriet Bishop and Fanny Fligelman Brin; Sarah Burger Stearns, who threw herself into the women’s rights struggle when she was just 14; and Dr. Martha Ripley, who pioneered medical care for unwed mothers at a time when no Minneapolis hospital would admit them.

Minnesota was less than 1% black when the nation ratified the 19th Amendment. Yet one of the most dynamic figures remembered at the Minnesota memorial turns out to be a little-known African-American woman named Nellie Griswold Francis. She attended the charter meeting of the colored Everywoman Suffrage Club in 1914 and was elected its president, a position she held until well after passage of the 19th Amendment.

Francis used her influence to oppose discriminatory policies within the suffrage movement itself and also turned her attention to matters of racial justice in the broader society. She swung into action in 1920, after a jeering mob in Duluth stormed a jail and lynched three black circus workers. Less than a year later, she persuaded the state legislature to pass an anti-lynching bill of which she is said to have been the principal author.

New York has no shortage of distinguished women of color who deserve to be honored in a Central Park monument. The city will miss a vital opportunity if it repeats the long-standing historical mistake of portraying the suffrage movement as white.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e96a62bb-ec04-3dd7-a733-899d3be0cef1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/central-park-suffrage-monument-racism.html">The New York Times</a>.

A whitewashed monument to women's suffrage

The New York City commission that oversees public artworks embraced a lily-white version of history in March when it approved a monument to the women’s rights movement that is scheduled to be unveiled in Central Park next year.

The white men who donned tattered clothing and blackened themselves with burned cork introduced working-class patrons who had never so much as met an African-American to the dimwitted stereotype whose bulging eyes, rubbery lips and mangled speech would become ubiquitous in newspapers, radio, television, movies and advertising.

This debased depiction of blackness underwrote a white supremacist impulse that metastasized into every aspect of American life. The image tightened its grip on the country at a time when the South was lynching Negroes with impunity, writing them out of state constitutions and stocking its parks with monuments to slavery.

The most egregious versions of the stereotype were banished from the public square by the end of the 1960s. By then, of course, the dehumanized caricature with the scarlet, clownish mouth was imprinted in the popular imagination and firmly established as the fixation of choice for Ku Klux Klansmen.

The former Fox and NBC News host Megyn Kelly personified a broad national ignorance of this history this past fall when she insisted that blackface Halloween costumes were all in good fun and derided dissenters as “the costume police.” And in the past several months, Gucci, Prada and singer Katy Perry were forced to withdraw from the market some reviled fashion designs, revealing how the caricature manifests itself through people who are blind to what it connotes.

The blackface photographs that in January led newly installed Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, to resign — and a similar picture discovered on the medical school yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia — represent a more troubling aspect of this history. They illustrate how young white men who were destined for careers that gave them profound influence on the lives of African-Americans continued to privately embrace racist caricature long after it became unacceptable to do so in the open.

— White Supremacy’s Minstrel Face

The grinning stereotype that shuffled across the minstrel stage owes much to the itinerant actor and New Yorker Thomas Dartmouth Rice, “father of American minstrelsy,” who put on black makeup in about 1830 to sing and dance as a character known as Jim Crow. The name quickly became an insult to hurl at black people, and the expression was later appropriated to describe the Southern laws passed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were intended to erase the civil rights that black Southerners had gained after the Civil War.

The minstrel show spread rapidly from the Northeast to the rest of the country and came to encompass a range of ready-made stereotypes that new performers could step into. The characters included the “coon,” a denigrating synonym for anyone black; the “zip coon,” the free black person depicted as a buffoon for affecting independence, literacy and fine dress; the rotund “mammy,” who was made to stand in for all black women as she patrolled the kitchen wearing flowing clothes and an apron; and the pickaninny, the bestial child whose pigtails stood straight up in the air and who was often maligned as a watermelon thief.

The tortured minstrel face embodied the assertion that blackness was grotesque in itself because it could never achieve the mythical ideal of whiteness. As the filmmaker and art historian Manthia Diawara observed so cogently two decades ago, the caricature silenced the black body by deforming it, leaving “room only for white supremacy to speak through it.”

The parody jumped from the minstrel stage to radio — where white actors portraying black characters drew tens of millions of listeners for the infamous “Amos ’n’ Andy” show — and became one of the founding personas of Hollywood. White actors in blackface were featured in D.W. Griffith’s rabidly racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” — Hollywood’s first blockbuster, released in 1915. The movie valorized the Klan and depicted African-Americans as buffoons and incipient rapists. When the silent movies gave way to the talkies, household names like Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple took to the screen with darkened faces, transforming the racist caricature into family entertainment.

Commercial advertisers denigrated blackness to sell everything from tobacco to molasses to breakfast cereal. The most widely known of the jet-black commercial icons were the Gold Dust Twins, who appeared naked — except for their trademark tutus — and represented a popular brand of washing powder whose motto was “Let the Twins Do Your Work.” The twins, Goldie and Dustie, embodied the country’s determination to confine the African-American likeness to white-owned kitchens, where Aunt Jemima, the pancake matron, and Rastus, the chef on the Cream of Wheat box, stood vigil. Marilyn Kern-Foxworth writes in her study of racist advertising that it was difficult in the mid-20th century to “prepare a meal without using food products featuring a stereotypical pickaninny, black mammy or black Sambo.”

— Blackface at the Frat House

The minstrel caricature went hand-in-hand with white supremacy at colleges. The historian Anthony James showed in his study of Southern fraternities two decades ago that blackface acts at fundraisers, parades and other campus events were a “public performance by Greeks for the whole white community” until the onset of integration, after which these activities were mainly confined to fraternity and sorority houses.

USA Today deepened our understanding of this issue in February in a review of 900 yearbooks at 120 schools across the country. The analysis found that a number of schools had published racist yearbook images into the 1970s and 1980s — including “pictures of students dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and blackface, nooses and mock lynchings.” Those poses could have been lifted straight out of “The Birth of a Nation.”

The 1984 medical school yearbook photograph that generated calls for Northam to resign his governorship — a white man in blackface standing next to a person in Klan garb — comes from the same strain of images. Nevertheless, the Northam incident stands apart for two important reasons.

First, Northam was not a young undergraduate. He was embarking on a career as a physician with a responsibility to treat all patients equally. Second, he was educated in Virginia, the veritable cradle of eugenics and scientific racism. In the 20th century, the state harnessed both its formidable education system and the apparatus of government to advance eugenics, the belief that “feeblemindedness” and racial contamination from exposure to “mongrel” races posed a risk to white “racial purity.”

Virginia’s answer to this fictional problem was a system of forced sterilization that victimized people for half a century, continuing into the 1970s. (The state finally apologized for this shameful practice in 2002.)

As the historian Gregory Michael Dorr explains in his revelatory book “Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia,” the elites used a rhetoric of “eugenically informed white supremacy to champion public policy curtailing the individual liberties of blacks, poor whites, women, mental patients, and the disabled, preserving social stability and elite power.”

As a result, generations of Virginians embraced segregation as “the natural ordering of the world” and believed it was delineated by biological law. The fact that this racist ideology emanated from the University of Virginia — the most respected university in the former Confederacy — gave it credence elsewhere, lending support to racist medical policies that killed more African-Americans than all the lynch mobs that ever were. This is the historical backdrop against which these photographs deserve to be seen.

Instead of focusing on the blackface images alone, Americans should be asking themselves how the devaluation of blackness embodied in them affects the way white professionals like lawyers, teachers, police officers and — especially — doctors do their jobs.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d233f715-7292-4603-b376-40ec7a367ad2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/opinion/blackface-white-supremacy.html">The New York Times</a>.

Nineteenth-century minstrel entertainers spawned a racist caricature that endures to this day when they darkened their faces to portray black people as grinning, dancing simpletons.

How blackface feeds white supremacy

<h1>The lie holds that the amendment ended a centurylong struggle by guaranteeing women the right to vote. </h1>

The truth is that it barred states from denying voting rights based on gender but “guaranteed” nothing.

More than a dozen states had already granted millions of women voting rights before ratification, and millions of other women — particularly African-Americans in the Jim Crow South — remained shut out of the polls for decades afterward.

While middle-class white women celebrated with ticker tape parades, black women in the former Confederacy were being defrauded by voting registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence.

When the black suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell petitioned her white sisters for help, they responded that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem — not a gender problem — and beyond the movement’s writ.

This counterfeit distinction was familiar to black suffragists, who had argued for more than 50 years that they could no more separate gender from race in themselves than shed their skins.

The movement, however, had tended toward a definition of “women” that was implicitly limited to people of the gender who were white and middle class. Its most prominent advocates — Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.

Anthony — drove home that notion by rendering black women nearly invisible in their hugely influential “History of Woman Suffrage.”

As the push for white women’s rights neared its goal — a constitutional amendment — the movement hedged its bets by compromising with white supremacy.

Historians like Glenda Gilmore, Martha Jones, Nell Irvin Painter and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn have recently revised the whitewashed depiction of the women’s rights campaign by rescuing black suffragists from anonymity. This new, more inclusive portrait of the movement grows richer by the year and shows African-American women at the forefront of a struggle for universal rights that was far from over when white suffragists declared victory in 1920.

‘We Are All Bound Up Together’

The official suffrage history reduces the poet and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to a bit player, even though she was central to the struggles for both African-American and women’s rights and delivered what has come to be recognized as a visionary speech on the relationship between the two at the founding meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866.

A formidable intellectual, Harper had forged her ideas about universal rights in the abolitionist movement, where she earned acclaim as a speaker sharing the platform with luminaries like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott.

Harper believed deeply in interracial collaboration but committed to it on the condition that white women treat black women as equals. As historian Alison M. Parker has written, Harper vexed white women reformers by accusing them “of being directly complicit in the oppression of blacks,” and by demanding that they rid themselves of racism.

A committed egalitarian, she balked when suffragists embraced a definition of “women” that included only the educated and the affluent. In a now famous speech given in New York, Harper told the audience that fates of black and white, rich and poor were “all bound up together.” She refused to decouple race from gender, arguing that the day-to-day racism she and other black women experienced was in fact a “women’s issue” that suffragists were obligated to confront.

“You white women speak here of rights,” Harper said that day in 1866. “I speak of wrongs.” Reciting the litany of humiliations that black women had to endure on public conveyances — not because they were women but because they were black — she asked, “Are there no wrongs to be righted?”

Harper’s speech anticipated by more than a century the “intersectional” legal analysis of critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who showed how policies that treat race and gender as mutually exclusive deprive black women of redress in discrimination cases while also obscuring the fact that they struggle under the dual burdens of racism and sexism.

“History of Woman Suffrage” draws heavily on the proceedings of the 1866 meeting but tellingly leaves out Harper’s momentous speech. Historian Nell Irvin Painter argues that her words were “too strong” for white suffrage leaders who saw her polished, self-assured style as antithetical to what they viewed as blackness. They preferred the uneducated version of black womanhood embodied by the formerly enslaved suffragist Sojourner Truth, who entertained her audiences as she imparted her ideas.

Yet Harper’s poise and self-possession were the norm among the affluent freeborn black women who had time to engage with the suffrage movement. For example, sisters Harriett Forten Purvis and Margaretta Forten — daughters of the wealthy Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist James Forten and his wife, Charlotte — were central players in the staging of the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention in their hometown in 1854. Boston journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who played a leadership role in the Massachusetts suffrage movement in the late 1800s, was the wife of the pro-suffrage state legislator George L. Ruffin.

Another respected suffragist and abolitionist — but again, whose voice is missing from the suffragist narrative — is Sarah Parker Remond, who grew up in a prominent New England family. Remond, like Harper, was a member of the American Equal Rights Association. She was popular on the abolitionist speaking circuit and also toured the Northeast with her brother, Charles, in the late 1860s in support of women’s voting rights.

Chroniclers of the suffrage struggle tended not to record their black peers. Fortunately, the 1853 lawsuit Remond filed against two men who ejected her from an opera in Boston for reasons of race provides a window into what she believed. Archivist Dorothy Porter Wesley writes in her study of the Remond family that the judge issued a forceful decision, “fully sustaining the equal rights of our Colored citizens.” We also know that Remond grew sufficiently tired of racism in the United States and fled to Europe.

While Remond stumped for suffrage in the North, Charlotte Rollin of Charleston, South Carolina, pursued the same mission in the Reconstruction-era South. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn lists Rollin as the first South Carolinian to serve as a delegate at a national suffrage convention. In an 1870 speech — a rare occasion in which a black suffragist’s comments were set down — she argued for women’s rights under the universalist principle that denying rights to anyone endangers the rights of everyone:

“We ask suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the ground that we are human beings, and as such entitled to all human rights. While we concede that woman’s ennobling influence should be confined chiefly to home and society, we claim that public opinion has had a tendency to limit woman’s sphere to too small a circle, and until woman has the right of representation this will last and other rights will be held by an insecure tenure.”

White Suffragist Racism

Last year, Chicago renamed a prominent downtown street for the celebrated newspaper editor and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells, who also played a starring role in the earlier 20th-century suffrage movement. Less well known in the city today is the estimable Wells contemporary Fannie Barrier Williams, a member of the black elite who had a profound impact on Chicago during more than three decades of civic and political activism.

As her biographer, Wanda Hendricks, points out, Barrier Williams broadened her influence by crossing racial lines, becoming the first black woman admitted to the Chicago Women’s Club, one of the most powerful white women’s groups in the country. She led the charge to get black women politically engaged and worked tirelessly to open the business world to them as well.

As Harper did, she dissented from the white suffrage movement’s gender-centric view of voting rights, arguing that “black women had unique needs that were defined as much by race as they were by gender and region,” making clear that she was less interested in a political candidate’s gender than in what he or she had to say about the plight of African-Americans. Beyond that, she bluntly reminded white women that racism in their ranks represented a prime obstacle for black women, writing “that the exclusion of colored women and girls from nearly all places of employment is due mostly to the meanness of American women.”

The New York Times last year published a belated obituary of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, another pathbreaking African-American suffragist, who died in 1893. Shadd Cary is thought to be the first black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper and was also one of the first African-American female lawyers in the United States.

The newspaper — founded in Canada in 1853 and called The Provincial Freeman — reveled in the accomplishments of black women in particular and provided a rich forum for its readership to express itself in ways that would have been unthinkable a short time earlier. The Freeman set out what historian Martha Jones describes as “an ambitious array of rights to which women were entitled.” These included the right to speak and write in public, to own and control property, to hold elective office and to enter the professions.

Shadd Cary galvanized black women in Washington when she tried unsuccessfully to register to vote in 1871 — a year before Anthony was arrested in Rochester, New York, for voting illegally in the presidential election.

Shadd Cary’s biographer, Jane Rhodes, writes that she was attracted to ideas put forward by Stanton and Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association and stayed close to the organization even though its leaders “spurned any association with the cause of black suffrage” and adopted the stance that “educated white women were better suited to vote than illiterate black males.” Shadd Cary was typical; black women often stayed with white organizations that were hostile to African-American interests to raise issues that would otherwise be ignored.

‘Turned Their Backs on Women of Color’

The ratification of the 19th Amendment set off celebratory parades all across the country. But confetti was still rustling in the streets when black women across the South learned that the segregationist electoral systems would override the promise of voting rights by obstructing their attempts to register.

Some black women succeeded in adding their names to the rolls. But as historian Liette Gidlow shows in her revelatory study of the period, the files of the Justice Department, the NAACP and African-American newspapers were soon bursting with letters, investigations and affidavits documenting the disenfranchisement of black women, especially in but not limited to former Confederate states.

In Virginia, Gidlow writes, a college-educated mother of four named Susie W. Fountain was required to take “a “literacy test” that consisted of a blank sheet of paper; the registrar subsequently determined that she had failed. She later told an NAACP investigator she was “too humiliated and angry to try again.” A Birmingham, Alabama, teacher, Indiana Little, was arrested and sexually assaulted after leading a large crowd to the registrar’s office. As Little said in a sworn affidavit, she was “beat over the head unmercifully and … forced upon the officer’s demand to yield to him in an unbecoming manner.”

In what became known as “The Election Day Massacre,” a white mob burned to the ground a prosperous black community in the Central Florida town of Ocoee after African-Americans tried to vote.

By this time, white suffragists had declared the battle for women’s voting rights won and embarked on a campaign to prove the amendment successful. They had no interest in signing on to a cause that would undercut that story line.

This betrayal was especially painful for the black suffragists like Coralie Franklin Cook, who had once said of her idol, Susan B. Anthony, who died 14 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that “thousands of torches lighted by her hand will yet blaze the way to freedom for women.” By 1921, however, Cook lamented that, even though she had been “born a suffragist,” she had no choice but to retire from the field. The movement, she said, had “turned its back on women of color.” Organizations that are gearing up to commemorate next year’s centennial of the 19th Amendment are at risk of repeating that insult.

Americans are being forced to chose between a cherished lie and a disconcerting truth as they prepare to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

When the suffrage movement sold out

<h1>Imagine trudging into a hotel with your family at midnight — after a long, grueling drive — and being turned away by a clerk who “loses” your reservation when he sees your black face.</h1>

This was a common hazard for members of the African-American elite in 1932, the year Dr. B. Price Hurst of Washington was shut out of New York City’s Prince George Hotel despite having confirmed his reservation by telegraph.

Hurst would have planned his trip differently had he been headed to the South, where “whites only” signs were ubiquitous and well-to-do black travelers lodged in homes owned by others in the black elite. Hurst was a member of Washington’s “Colored Four Hundred” — as the capital’s black upper crust once was known — and was familiar with having to plan his life around hotels, restaurants and theaters in the city, and throughout the Jim Crow South, that screened out people of color.

Hurst expected better of New York City. He did not let the matter rest after the Prince George turned his travel-weary family into the streets. He wrote an anguished letter to Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, explaining how he had been rejected by four hotels before shifting his search to the black district of Harlem. He then sued the Prince George for violating New York state’s civil rights laws, winning a settlement that put the city’s hotels on notice that discrimination could carry a financial cost.

African-Americans who embraced automobile travel to escape filthy, “colored-only” train cars learned quickly that the geography of Jim Crow was far more extensive than they had imagined. The motels and rest stops that deprived them of places to sleep were just the beginning.

While driving, these families were often forced to relieve themselves in roadside ditches because the filling stations that sold them gas barred them from using “whites only” bathrooms.

White motorists who drove clunkers deliberately damaged expensive cars driven by black people — to put Negroes “in their places.”

“Sundown Towns” across the country banned African-Americans from the streets after dark, a constant reminder that the reach of white supremacy was vast indeed.

As still happens today, police officers who pulled over motorists of color for “driving while black” raised the threat that black passengers would be arrested, battered or even killed during the encounter.

Negro Traveler’s Bible

The Hurst case was a cause célèbre in 1936 when a Harlem resident and postal worker named Victor Hugo Green began soliciting material for a national travel guide that would steer black motorists around the humiliations of the not-so-open road and point them to businesses that were more than happy to accept colored dollars. As historian Gretchen Sullivan Sorin writes in her revelatory study of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the guide became “the bible of every Negro highway traveler in the 1950s and early 1960s.”

Green, who died in 1960, is experiencing a renaissance thanks to heightened interest from filmmakers: The 2018 feature film “Green Book” won three Golden Globes this month, and the documentary “Driving While Black” is scheduled for broadcast by PBS next year.

Then there is The New York Times opinion section’s Op-Doc film “Traveling While Black,” which debuted Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. The brief 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 extended well beyond the one Hurst suffered in New York City.

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.

This had deadly implications in places where emergency medical services were assigned on the basis of race. Of all the afflictions devised in the Jim Crow era, medical racism was the most lethal. African-American accident victims could easily be left to die because no “black” ambulance was available. Black patients taken to segregated hospitals, where they sometimes languished in basements or even boiler rooms, suffered inferior treatment.

In a particularly telling case in 1931, the light-skinned father of White, the NAACP leader, was struck by a car and mistakenly admitted to the beautifully equipped “white” wing of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. When relatives who were recognizably black came looking for him, hospital employees dragged the victim from the examination table to the decrepit Negro ward across the street, where he later died.

That same year, Juliette Derricotte, the celebrated African-American educator and dean of women at Fisk University, succumbed to injuries suffered in a car accident near Dalton, Georgia, after a white hospital refused her treatment.

Advertising to the Black Elite

Victor Hugo Green remains a mysterious figure about whom we know very little. He rarely spoke directly to “Green Book” readers, instead publishing testimonial letters in what the historian Cotten Seiler describes as an act of promotional “ventriloquism.” The debut edition did not exhort black travelers to boycotts or include demands for equal rights. Instead, Green represented the guide as a benign compilation of “facts and information connected with motoring, which the Negro Motorist can use and depend upon.”

The coolly reasoned language put white readers at ease and allowed the “Green Book” to attract generous corporate and government sponsorship. Green nevertheless practiced the African-American art of coded communication, addressing black readers in messages that went over white peoples’ heads. Consider the passage: “Today, our thousands of travelers, if they be thoughtful enough to arm themselves with a ‘Green Book,’ may free themselves of a lot of worry and inconvenience as they plan a trip.”

White readers viewed this as a common-sense statement about vacation planning. For African-Americans who read in black newspapers about the fates that befell people like Derricotte, the notion of “arming” oneself with the guide referred to taking precautions against racism on the road.

The “Green Book” was subversive in another way as well. It promoted an image of African-Americans that white Americans rarely saw — and that Hollywood deliberately avoided in films for fear of offending racist Southerners. The guide’s signature image, shown on the cover of the 1948 edition — and used as stationery logo for Victor Green Inc. — consisted of a smiling, well-dressed couple striding toward their car carrying expensive suitcases.

Green believed exposing white Americans to the black elite might persuade white business owners that black consumer spending was significant enough to make racial discrimination imprudent. Like the black elite itself, he subscribed to the view that affluent travelers of color could change white minds about racism simply by venturing to places where black people had been unseen. As it turned out, black travelers had a democratizing effect on the country.

Like many African-American institutions that thrived during the age of extreme segregation, the “Green Book” faded in influence as racial barriers began to fall. It ceased publication not long after the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations. Nevertheless, the guide’s three decades of listings offer an important vantage point on black business ownership and travel mobility in the age of Jim Crow.

In other words, the “Green Book” has a lot more to say about the time when it was the Negro traveler’s bible.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2c7df92a-93db-4aa0-9134-7b965488cb4b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/green-book-black-travel.html">The New York Times</a>.

This was a common hazard for members of the African-American elite in 1932, the year Dr. B. Price Hurst of Washington was shut out of New York City’s Prince George Hotel despite having confirmed his reservation by telegraph.

The green book's black history

<h1>This was a common hazard for members of the African-American elite in 1932, the year Dr. B. Price Hurst of Washington was shut out of New York City’s Prince George Hotel despite having confirmed his reservation by telegraph.</h1>

Imagine trudging into a hotel with your family at midnight — after a long, grueling drive — and being turned away by a clerk who “loses” your reservation when he sees your black face.

Politics

Local

Filla

World

News

Football

Ghana Premier League

Black Stars

Sports

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Explore categories

Pulse Ghana is the most followed news and entertainment platform, informing and engaging young Ghanaians round the clock, providing updates by the hour.

Brent Staples

Articles written by the author

A whitewashed monument to women's suffrage

How blackface feeds white supremacy

When the suffrage movement sold out

The green book's black history

The green book's black history