Not even Candacy Taylor’s electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book can fully explain what inspired Victor Green to launch his guidebooks for black travelers in 1938. There were similar, short-lived guides meant to help black travelers avoid the humiliations of Jim Crow laws and so-called sundown communities, where black people had to be out of town by 6 p.m. But Green, who lived in Harlem and was a mail carrier in Hackensack, New Jersey, for 39 years, was informative, sincere and genial. He had staying power. His guides were published annually from 1938 to 1967, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, with a hiatus during World War II. In the best years, millions of copies may have been sold.

In Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, Taylor follows the chronology of the Green Book’s development and, more importantly, provides fascinating and often disturbing context. The first guide, for example, focused mostly on Harlem, so Taylor presents riveting stories about the Apollo Theater and the Lafayette Theater, where Orson Welles produced “Voodoo Macbeth,” a retelling of the Shakespeare play with an all-black cast. In the section that recommends a few golf courses open to black players, we learn that a black dentist named George Grant invented the golf tee, and that in Louisiana, a black man named Joseph Bartholomew designed public golf courses that he wasn’t allowed to play on. We also learn that the automobile freed black travelers from the constant indignities visited upon them when they took trains and buses; that Cadillac ordered its dealers not to sell to black people because it would damage the brand; and that, since black GIs returning from World War II had difficulty using the GI Bill for college, Green’s postwar editions included a list of black colleges and universities.

This only touches the surface of Taylor’s amazing book. As part of her research, she traveled thousands of miles and visited more than 4,000 sites listed in editions of the Green Book. Only 5% of those businesses still exist, most having succumbed to urban blight or urban renewal, which bulldozed many black neighborhoods to make way for local freeways. Taylor generated so much fascinating material in working on this book that she’s now developing a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition. 

Overground Railroad is an eye-opening, deeply moving social history of American segregation and black migration during the middle years of the 20th century.

The role free black settlers played in opening up the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War remains virtually unmentioned—and certainly unexamined—in most general American histories. To show the extent of this migration toward supposed freedom, Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, begins this study by citing the locales of 338 black farming settlements that were established between 1800 and 1860 in the territory that would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Cox then follows the story of how the ideals of racial equality enunciated in the Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787 were ever-so-slowly eroded by the same greed and assertions of white supremacy that were then prevalent in America’s slave-holding South.

There are three main strands in Cox’s narrative—a running account of attitudes and actions toward slavery at the Federal level throughout this period; a sampling of local and statewide laws restricting black voting, occupancy and land ownership in the frontier Northwest; and sketches of specific black families that focus on the harsh work they did to carve out their farms from the forests while simultaneously confronting thickets of prejudices.

Even though slavery itself was illegal is this area, enterprising whites asserted their control by chaining their black workers to indentured servitude (for spans as long as 90 years) and requiring even land-owning blacks to carry identity papers. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 made things even worse, enabling whites to seize and sell free blacks on the pretense that they were escaped slaves.

Conditions didn’t get measurably better in the region after the Civil War and the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed blacks the right to vote. Racial prejudice, envy and state-ignored violence continued. Today, evidence of the pioneering African-American presence exists only here and there in place names, still-functioning churches and local lore. The Bone and Sinew of the Land takes a step toward remembering it.

If you only know Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. as the engaging host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” you might at first be perplexed by what he calls “the retro title” of his new work. It was, in fact, chosen in homage to a 1957 book by Joel Augustus Rogers entitled 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, which was billed at the time as a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! about black history.

If Rogers was a black history teacher for the 20th century, Gates is certainly one for ours. Like Rogers, Gates aspires “to be ever curious, open, and alive,” and his writing here showcases those qualities. Rogers based his book on his newspaper columns. Likewise, Gates’ selections first appeared as essays in his online magazine The Root.

A series of 100 questions with short answers, the book is a freewheeling exploration of black history. Gates takes on questions such as “Who was the first black saint?” as well as “Who was the first black person to see the baby Jesus?” and “What happened to Argentina’s black population?” An essay about the first black fighter pilot is followed by a question about slave ownership. Topics range from sports to civil rights and the slave trade, the Civil War, piracy and even the Salem witch trials.

Gates is a historian, but he is also a consummate teacher. And one of the charms of the volume is that the essays appear in no particular order, making it ideal for dipping into at will or keeping on a bedside table to pick up before bed. But be forewarned: In the hands of a skilled storyteller like Gates, this fascinating history will definitely not put you to sleep.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Echoing loudly down the corridors of history, several events in 1968 and the years just before it rang incessantly in the ears of Americans, and African Americans in particular. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 fostered both hope and frustration: hope for the future, and frustration that progress came so slowly. Then, in April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., coupled with the rise of the Black Power movement, lent urgency to the cause of civil rights. Along with concerns about the military draft, racial inequalities in the American education system stirred many of the nation’s largest and most vocal protests.

While debates over integration fueled the fires of protests on many college campuses, the evidence of integration at those same schools was indeed scant. In spite of the formal end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, most of the nation’s top colleges and universities remained strongholds of white privilege in 1968. In the fall of that year, however, a group of diverse African-American students—including Clarence Thomas, the novelist Edward P. Jones, the football player Eddie Jenkins and lawyers Ted Wells and Stanley Grayson—arrived at College of the Holy Cross, a small Jesuit college in central Massachusetts.

As journalist Diane Brady points out in Fraternity, her moving chronicle of the times and the lives of these men, such an event might not have happened if not for the passionate commitment of the Reverend John Brooks to King’s ideals of equality and social justice. The 44-year-old priest convinced leaders of the college that the school was missing out on an opportunity to help shape an ambitious generation of black men growing up in America, and he received the authority to recruit black students and offer them full scholarships.

Of course, racial prejudice and slurs didn’t disappear once Jones, Thomas and the others entered Holy Cross. Brady nicely weaves Brooks’ forceful support of the black students and their goals with the stories of the students themselves and their discomforts, their struggles and their eventual triumphs. As Brady offers heretofore unseen glimpses into the early lives of this fraternity of African Americans, she also brings to our attention for the first time an unsung hero of the civil rights movement.