The Negro Motorist Green-Book
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guidebook for African American roadtrippers. It was founded by Victor Hugo Green, an African American postal worker from New York City, and was published annually from 1936 to 1966. This was during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. While pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. In the South, where Black motorists risked harassment or physical violence, these dangers were particularly severe. In some cases, African American travelers who got lost or sought lodging off the beaten path were killed, with little to no investigation by local authorities. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African Americans. Eventually, he also founded a travel agency.
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What Hacker News says
- > But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.
This was definitely a lesson I learned. I grew up in the midwest, and because racism of the Jim Crow sort was more blatant in the south, I thought we were relatively innocent. But I no longer think that.
As an example, I got a reproduction of the Negro Motorist Green Book. [1] It was a good exercise trying to imagine planning one of the road trips I've been on, but only staying at the small number of places that would accept black people.
I also learned from that book that there was one town in Michigan where well-off black people went to vacation: Idlewild. [2] It was created because black people in Chicago and Detroit were excluded from other vacation spots. I grew up not far from this place and nobody ever mentioned the history to me. Not accidental, I'm sure, that white people forgot all about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
- So the sharing economy is when a company profits off the free labor of others. I mean, they could have hired couriers, but that would be more expensive.
Got it.
And no, as the history behind the 2018 movie 'Green Book' taught us, the real sharing economy, as is something other than labor exploitation, has older roots.
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guidebook published 1936–1966 for African-Americans to have safe road trips during the Jim Crow era. Some of the information was voluntarily collected by U.S postal workers who gathered the information while on their routes.
> In a world with the Internet, cryptography, and the blockchain
BLOCKCHAIN? How old is this article? Ahh, February 14, 2016.
Well that didn't age well.
- As I commented when this came up yesterday, there are older (and better!) examples of a sharing economy.
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guidebook published 1936–1966 for African-Americans to have safe road trips during the Jim Crow era. Some of the information was voluntarily collected by U.S postal workers who gathered the information while on their routes.
I say 'better' because paid couriers existed long before DHL. What DHL did (according to this account) was find a way to replace them with cheaper workers and not have to share the profits but instead use those profits to defend legal challenges against their business model.
- > Open Source has shown that individuals will work on solutions
Sure, but that's nothing special about open source. Individuals have worked on solutions for a very long time. "The Negro Motorist Green Book" would not have worked without the contribution of many individuals to the solution.
> Of course, doing this day in and day out could lead to burnout
As Open Source demonstrated earlier this year in the xz utilities backdoor.
> a form of collaborative socialism can work
I think it's important to be cautious about what "socialism" means.
Is a barn raising "socialism"? Is a trade group socialism? Is the Chromium project a form of socialism?
> The notion that people only contribute to projects for monetary gain or self-interest is simply not true.
But surely that's true of most jobs. Like, people become teachers not just for the money, but also because they like to help kids learn.
I'll bet you that most of the people with a full-time job working on Chromium or Firefox would stop if they weren't being paid for it.
> before Git, we had numerous private code repositories
You are mistaking a version control system software license with access to the source repository. In the 1990s I used RCS, which was distributed under the GPL. However, the repositories were proprietary, just like how there are a lot of private git repositories now.
> what innovations in materials, construction, and design could arise if we treated housing like an open-source project?
We already have a lot of "open source" in that space, including Habitat for Humanity. Or for real "socialized housing", do what the socialists do - have the city set up a building company to use taxes to build new housing, with the cities acting as at-cost rather than profit-seeking landlords.
Or change the laws to promote nonprofit cooperative building societies.
Similarly, if open-source is socialism then open-source transportation is known as (city/county/community/government) mass transit.
And open-source farming would be something like Ocean Spray Cranberries, the co-op which produces 70% of North American cranberry production, yes?
- I was suprised to learn that Tea Room moreso than advertising tea was advertising a women-friendly environment to the new generation since apparently a woman would often not be welcome at a restaurant unaccompanied by man.
Also the Green Book is mentioned. It was a guide detailing the location of black-friendly establishments which was especially invaluable when going for long distance drives in unknown territory. Published all the way up to '66!
- During the Jim Crow area, many towns and cities put up signs that read
African-American laborers could come into town for work during the day, but any who found themselves there after dark were liable to be lynched or otherwise hassled out of town. While African-Americans were the most common target, Asian-Americans[0] and Jews were sometimes the subject of these warnings/threats. The cities that put up these signs and highway billboards became known as Sunset Towns (although in the last 2 decades the term "Sundown town"[1] became more popular[2]).N*****, Don’t Let the Sun Set On You in $CITY_NAMEThe Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide that was written to help black people plan roadtrips. It acknowledged that "the White traveler has had no difficulty in getting accommodations, but with the Negro it has been different". The Green Book warned about Sunset towns and had pointers for finding friendly lodgings. Sunset towns weren't limited to the Deep South: New England and California also took part in the practice, and Route 66 was notoriously difficult for black travelers.
Afroman immortalized a Californian sundown town and its racial housing covenant in his song "Colt 45"[3]:
Well, it was just sundown in a small white town
They call it East Side Palmdale
When the Afroman walked through the white land
Houses went up for sale
Well, I was standing on the corner sellin' rap CDs
When I met a little girl named Jan, I let her ride in my Caddy
'Cause I didn't know her daddy was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan
[0]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BLlJwLdIRpk/RZ1Bfy6G8CI/AAAAAAAAAB...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
[2]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sunset+town%2C...
