The Green Book, also known as the Negro Motorist Green Book and the Negro Travelers Green Book is an important part of African American history.

Created to aid African Americans who wanted to travel through the USA during the period if segregation this book was an essential guide to where one could safely step foot and empowered many all over the country.

Now, that book is an interactive app so we can step back in time and see how people travelled in the not-so-distant past. Of course travelling while black can still present some serious problems so parts of the book I am sure still hold some relevance today!

The Root wrote:

During the Jim Crow era, black travelers faced a number of concerns: Many hotels, inns and restaurants didn’t allow black customers. White-owned businesses in the South often refused to service vehicles driven by African Americans. Even stopping to use gas station restrooms was fraught with peril across the Southern United States. In 1956, only three hotels in the entire state of New Hampshire offered accommodations to black travelers.

Thus, this was not just a Southern phenomenon. According to the book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Racism, by the end of the 1960s, more than 10,000 towns forbade blacks from entering their city limits after dark, including Glendale, Calif., and Warren, Mich. Over half the incorporated towns in Illinois were “sundown towns” like Anna, Ill., which expelled its entire black population in 1909 and had the unofficial slogan “Ain’t no niggers allowed.”

In 1937, a mail carrier named Victor Hugo Green published the Negro Motorist Green Book—a guide for New York of places that welcomed black travelers. He relied on information from fellow black postal carriers, and the book became so popular, many referred to it as “the bible for black travelers.” By the time the last edition of the Green Book was published in 1966-1967, it had expanded from a 15-page guide for New York to 99 pages of information indicating safe harbor for blacks traveling all over America and internationally.

Listing hotels, restaurants and other businesses open to African-Americans, the guide was…

Created by the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, the Green Book of South Carolina has been designed for travelers and residents interested in the cultural and historical sites across the state. Similar to a tourism app, it encompasses every county in South Carolina and highlights the rich cultural history of places like Charleston’s slave market, numerous civil rights landmarks and the historic Rosenwald Schools.

Get more details about the app on The Root here.