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Review of ‘Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America’

Posted on by Chris Lezotte

As a member of the Society of Automotive Historians, I am sometimes asked to provide a review of a book nominated for the prestigious Cugnot Award for the organization’s bi-monthly SAH Journal. One of the books under consideration in 2021 was Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor. I was introduced to The Green Book through Cotten Seiler’s seminal text Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America while a graduate student at Eastern Michigan University; the publication came into the public consciousness with the release of the Oscar winning film of the same name. I welcomed the opportunity to read and review the most current examination of this influential and important publication. It proved to be an interesting and enlightening read. For those who may be curious about the book, I have included my review below.

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
By Candacy Taylor
Abrams Press, NY (2020)
360 pages, 6 ½: x 9 ½” hardcover, dustcover 
150 color and black-and-white illustrations
Price: $35
ISBN: 9781419738173

The Green Book – a travel guide for black Americans produced from 1936-1967 –  is the subject of two exemplary publications released in 2020. Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights was reviewed in the March/April 2021 issue of the SAH Journal and was the recipient of a 2021 Cugnot Award of Distinction. Author Gretchen Sorin focuses her account on the history of African-American car ownership and travel, particularly how the Green Book served as an impetus for black Americans to break the societal constraints of mobility placed on them since the days of slavery. Candacy Taylor, in Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, takes a somewhat different, yet equally impactful, approach. Relying on historical documents, photographs, oral histories, family stories, as well as personal visits to remaining businesses and building sites featured in the travel guide, Taylor provides a chronology of the Green Book within the context of historical events that made its publication valuable if not vital to the black community. 

The Green Book was created to address the need and desire of black Americans to engage in safe travel during the Jim Crow era. The publication’s byline – ‘Carry Your Green Book With You – You May Need It’ – underscores the difficulties African-Americans faced when journeying away from home through unfamiliar areas. Yet as Taylor argues, the Green Book’s influence and impact was twofold. Not only did the annual publication serve as an essential travel guide, but as an effective and indispensable marketing tool for black-owned businesses as well. Through advertising, grassroots promotion, and word of mouth, the Green Book assembled an impressive list of hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, recreation areas, stores, service stations, salons, and vacation spots that offered safe and welcoming accommodations for black travelers. Taylor’s examination of the Green Book is unique in this regard. For while she offers historical and first-hand accounts of the dangers of driving while black in America, she also suggests that the very need for a travel guide provided recognition as well as financial support for the many black-owned business establishments featured in each issue. This shared emphasis weaves throughout each chapter, as Taylor combines historical data and personal accounts of black travel with descriptions and photographs – many taken by the author – of the sites frequented by black individuals and families as they made their way across American roads. Taylor also includes a chapter on how the Green Book served as a source of empowerment for black women, who through advertising in the publication were able to experience a measure of success running businesses that included hotels, beauty shops, tourist homes, and sex clubs. Another chapter is devoted to the Green Book’s role in the Great Migration, and how it provided information not only on safe stops along the way but also on welcoming locations in which to relocate. 

Taylor holds a master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies and is widely recognized as an award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian. Like much of her previous work, Overground Railroad is part of a broader project which includes the book, a traveling exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution, as well as a children’s book, board game, and walking tour mobile app. In the book’s afterword, Taylor includes a Green Book Site Tour, the Green Book Cover Guide, as well as recommendations for local and national activism supported by a who’s who list of prominent African-American scholars, journalists, and legal experts. Taylor’s overarching goal in this project is not only to examine the Green Book’s influence on black American travel and black-owned businesses during the era framed by Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, but also to inspire readers to challenge the social and legal inequalities that exist in the present day. 

While The Overground Railroad is well-researched, it is more experiential than academic, often relying on recollections of family members and black business owners, as well as  observations from Taylor’s 40,000 mile road trip in which she visits and documents nearly 3,600 remaining Green Book establishments and former building sites. The book’s less scholarly, more familiar language and tone makes the book accessible to a wider, and perhaps more inclusive, audience. That being said, the Overground Railroad project has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants from prominent educational and cultural institutions and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020.

Prior to the release of the popular motion picture The Green Book in 2018, most Americans were unfamiliar with the publication from which it took its name or the need for its existence. Overground Railroad is both a timely and necessary follow-up to the Oscar-winning film. Throughout its adeptly researched and photo-rich chapters, Taylor not only documents the injustices and real-life dangers black Americans faced while on the road, but provides the impetus to create change through political activism. As Taylor writes, “I wanted to show [the Green Book] in the context of this country’s ongoing struggle with race and social mobility.” For the problems black Americans face today, Taylor continues, “are arguably just as debilitating and deadly as the problems the Green Book helped black people avoid more than 80 years ago” (22). Overground Railroad is recommended not only as a unique examination of a dark era of American history, but to demonstrate how, as Taylor asserts, “real change can come from simple tools that solve a problem. That is why the Green Book was so powerful” (295). 

Announcements

Published in The Journal of Popular Culture

Posted on by Chris Lezotte

“What Would Miss Daisy Drive? The Road Trip Film, the Automobile, and the Woman Behind the Wheel” has been posted in pre-publication form on Wiley Article Share for inclusion in the next issue of The Journal of Popular Culture. In this article, I examine the relationship between a woman and a particular automobile in ten post-Thelma and Louise female road trip films. These films include Anywhere But Here, Tumbleweeds, Grandma, Tammy, Camilla, Cloudburst, Bonneville, Leaving Normal, Boys on the Side, and Manny and Lo [featuring a very young Scarlett Johansson]. The eclectic group of cars – 12 in all – include a 1955 Dodge Lancer, 1968 gold Mercedes, 1990 Ford Ranger pickup, 1974 VW Thing, 1966 Pontiac Bonneville, 1987 Toyota Corolla, 1999 Cadillac Deville, 1970 Pontiac Le Mans, 1970 Pontiac GTO, a 1970ish Checker Marathon, 1990 Chevrolet Caprice Wagon, and 1994 Mercury Villager minivan.

After making it across the Canadian border in a 1990 Ford Ranger, Dottie (Brenda Fricker) and Stella (Olympia Dukakis) stop to complete a marriage license in Cloudburst.

This was a fun project to work on – I watched many memorable as well as not-so-great female road films to make my selections – and I enjoyed the process of looking at the vehicles as important supporting players rather than mere props. Other than exhaustive literature on Thelma and Louise, the relationship between a woman and her car in film has not received much attention in scholarship. Hopefully this article will encourage folks to look at the cars and the women who drive them differently, not only in film but in all aspects of American life.

Manny (Scarlet Johansson) and Lo (Aleksa Palladino) call upon their late mother’s 1990 Chevrolet Caprice wagon to assemble a new family in Manny and Lo.
AnnouncementsWomen & Car Advertising

Cover Story in the Automotive History Review

Posted on by Chris Lezotte
Automotive History Review cover – Spring 2021

Writing about my experiences in a Detroit automotive advertising agency nearly 30 years ago was both a reflective and enjoyable experience. However, as my memory fades increasingly each year, I wasn’t sure I could remember enough about my time at McCann Erickson to produce a readable and interesting article. Fortunately, I was able to connect with a couple of my former co-workers who helped fill in some of the auto – and memory – blanks. As the article notes, the time spent at McCann was both fun and frustrating. I was able to produce some good work, but was also subject to the sexual harassment commonplace in the pre Anita Hill era. That being said, what should be remembered is that the article is not meant to convey a universal experience; rather, it is a reflection of one woman’s recollection of a particular time and place in automotive advertising history.

I was thrilled when asked to contribute to the Automotive History Review – the premier publication of the Society of Automotive Historians [SAH], and honored to be featured on the cover. AHR editor John Heitmann wrote this about my short piece:

Chris Lezotte lived automotive history while working in automotive advertising in Detroit during the 1970s and 1980s. She tells us her story but much more. Her fascinating piece adds considerable background to those of us who view advertising as part of the historical record. To be sure there are several key studies that help us interpret what advertising is, and whether it is a bell weather of social preferences or the shaper of consumer wants, but what Chris does is give us a down-to-earth primer of great value.

I hope those who come upon this article – available through the SAH website – will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

AnnouncementsCar Culture

Review of ‘Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession’

Posted on by Chris Lezotte

As a scholar, albeit of the independent variety, I am sometimes asked to contribute to research in various ways. A little over a year ago The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth asked if I would write a book review on a car-and-youth related publication for an upcoming issue. As I am always open to a new opportunity, I gladly accepted, particularly since I had already purchased the book and was planning on reading it anyway. The review was recently published in the JHCY Winter 2020 issue. Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession by historian Gary Cross is an interesting and in-depth look at the various American youth car cultures of the 20th century. For those who may be curious about the book, I have included my review here.

Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession
By Gary S. Cross
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 227 pp. Paper $32.50, cloth $97.50.

Machines of Youth is a colorful chronology of American youth car cultures from the early automotive age to the present day. Relying on an eclectic assemblage of sources – interviews, print media, automotive publications, popular culture, and personal anecdotes – historian Gary Cross has constructed a compelling examination of a rarely researched subject and subculture. Although the book stands on its own as an in-depth exploration of young men’s involvement and fascination with cars over the past century, it also serves as a rarely examined but timely analysis of white working-class youth culture in twentieth-century America. In Machines of Youth, Cross takes us beyond the scope of traditional automotive histories to investigate the teenage cultures that evolved along its margins. To young working-class men, Cross argues, car culture was not only a community in which automotive craftsmanship and knowledge could be developed and shared, but also served as an important source of masculinity, autonomy, individualism, self-expression, and rebellion.

Cross skillfully intertwines automobile history with the teenage cultures it generated. Each chapter introduces cars of a particular generation and the young men who became engaged, if not obsessed, with the growing automotive phenomenon. Some of the stops along the way include the early auto age and young men’s growing preoccupation with the gasoline-powered automobile, the 1930s customizing and “souping up” craze, the 1940s hot rod wars, the 1950s and 60s cruising and parking culture, and the Fast and Furious era of Japanese “rice burners”. Cross also makes an intriguing detour into the familial and community Latino car culture of “low and slow”. At each juncture Cross delves into how a particular culture came to be, considers how and why boys became involved, investigates the influence of club life and the media, considers how the subcultures were regarded by the public, and discusses the efforts made to suppress, disregard, or encourage young men’s automotive activities. Cross concludes the book by considering the state of car culture today, the role of nostalgia in its maintenance, as well as whether there remains enough automotive interest for its continuance into the future.

Although car cultures attracted teens from all walks of life – e.g. baby boomer muscle car enthusiasts and middle-class hippies who tinkered with aging VW Beetles – Cross is particularly interested in the role the automobile played in the lives of white working-class youth. In the chapter devoted to “greasers and their rods,” Cross examines how cars gave these “marginal” high school boys an opportunity to define themselves apart from the mainstream white middle-class population. As the author notes, while middle-class teens on the “college prep” track were likely to drive cars owned or purchased by their parents, working-class youth in the vocational curriculum took pride in working on their own jalopies. Thus, as Cross writes, “the customized car offered a token of dignity to a group that had always been subordinate, but which in the mid-twentieth century was steadily losing ground” (99). Cross’s examination of white working-class youth is particularly timely given the current political climate, which has witnessed a growing sentiment of discontent and disaffection among rural white working-class men.

Machines of Youth is a welcome and important addition to existing automotive scholarship. Although much has been written on the history of the automobile, only a handful of scholars (e.g. Karen Lumsden, Amy Best, Brenda Bright, Sarah Redshaw) have investigated specific car cultures. And while Cross presents an engaging examination of the history of young men’s involvement with cars, the volume’s strength comes from its unique focus on class (in addition to gender and race) as an influential and crucial component of American youth car cultures. What the book lacks, however, is diversity in research location. Although the west coast was certainly an important breeding ground for youth car cultures, there is a little too much emphasis on the California car scene. While other locations are mentioned, the tone of the book suggests the majority of youth automotive activity occurred in the Golden State. Cross also fails to lay out his methodology in the introductory section. Consequently, it is up to the reader to piece the research sources together chapter by chapter.

Machines of Youth is certain to be embraced by aging men of a particular generation who grew up with a passion for cars and see themselves in its pages. For auto historians, Cross’s astute analysis of young men’s engagement with the automobile provides a social context to the ebb and flow of automotive popularity over the past century. However, scholars of youth cultures will find Cross’s work fascinating whether or not they have an interest in cars. The focus on white working-class teens is not only engrossing and enlightening in its own right, but has particular relevance during this disquieting time in our nation’s political history.

Do you have a favorite car book? What makes an automotive book worth reading? Your suggestions are welcome!

Announcements

On Board the Society of Automotive Historians

Posted on by Chris Lezotte

I have just been notified of my election to the Society of Automotive Historians board of directors. I hesitated to run for this position as I am not a historian nor do I have a deep knowledge or technical understanding of automobiles. However, because I come to automotive scholarship from a cultural rather than historical perspective, and because my research interest is the relationship between women and cars, it was suggested that I might offer a new point of view to what has long been a male-dominated and technologically-focused discipline. So here I am. As only the fourth woman to be elected to the SAH board I am both excited and nervous. I join a group of well-respected and accomplished individuals that includes academic scholars, automotive journalists and publishers, museum and library professionals, educational and cultural organizations, car collectors and restorers, and auto enthusiasts. I hope that I can contribute to this organization and the research it fosters. I look forward to serving alongside my fellow car chick Carla Lesh. I hope our presence will encourage others – whose gender, age, or sexual orientation has placed them on the margins of automotive history and research – to contribute to and become part of the SAH as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.

What topics should organizations such as the SAH address? What kind of activities should they sponsor? For information on what the Society of Automotive Historians does now, and what needs to be done to grow the future, I encourage you to visit SAH online.

Announcements

Published in Journal of Transport History

Posted on by Chris Lezotte

“Born to Drive: Elderly Women’s Recollections of Early Automotive Experiences” has been posted on Open Access with a December 2019 publication date. This was a wonderful project to work on, as the women I interviewed were generous, funny, and had amazing car stories to tell. I am honored to have my work published in this prestigious journal, and I thank the reviewers who offered suggestions, critique, and encouragement in the revision process.

Do you have a mother, grandmother, or family friend now in her 80s or 90s? I invite you to ask those women about their early driving experiences before it is too late. You are welcome to share those stories in the comments section.

Announcements

“A Woman and Her Truck” goes international

Posted on by Chris Lezotte
One of the awesome truck-driving-women who contributed to this project.

A dissertation chapter that turned into a conference presentation that evolved into a journal article has finally been published in the European Journal of American Culture. “A Woman and Her Truck: Pickups, the Woman Driver, and Cowgirl Feminism” was inspired by a Chevy commercial and a chance visit to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. This article provided me with the opportunity to talk with 25 women from all over the US who are passionate about pickups.

Are you a woman with a pickup? What do you use it for and how do you feel when driving it? You are welcome to share your truck stories in the comments section.