SKOKIE, IL, Jan. 12, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Green Book for Negro Motorists, an exhibition developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in collaboration with award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian Candacy Taylor, comes to the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in time for Black History Month. The exhibition opens on January 29th and runs until April 23rd, 2023.

What is The Negro Motorist Green Book about?
The Green Book, first published in 1936 under the title The Negro Motorist Green Book, was created for the growing African American middle class who had the desire and financial means to travel the country but were short of many resources and opportunities limited accommodation was necessary. Social and legal constraints, including emissive hotels, restaurants, and gas stations, as well as Jim Crow-era laws and “sundown towns” — communities where African Americans were legally forbidden to spend the night — ran rampant in many places across America spread.

The book provided black customers with a guide to hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and cultural attractions that would accept their business. Often these resources were owned and operated by black people themselves. In Chicago, The Green Book directed travelers primarily to listings in the South Side community of Bronzeville, built by the black migrants who transformed the Chicago area during the Great Migration. Of the more than 180 companies listed in Chicago, nearly 80% were located in the Bronzeville District, an area known as a mecca for black manufacturing, hair care, publishing and banking.

The Green Book was edited annually by Victor Hugo Green (1892-1960), a New Yorker who, due to the book’s success, retired from his job as a mailman and expanded into the travel booking business. The Green Book has been an important handbook for decades.

Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, predecessor of the exhibition’s national sponsor…