An excerpt from Now I Know -
The Negro Motorist Green Book
Every year, Zagat publishes a series of guides to the restaurants in virtually every major city in the United States. The guides feature short, curated descriptions of each eatery, touching upon the must-have (or must-avoid) dishes, the service, the decor, and of course, the price. But it what Zagat doesn’t tell you is if they’ll serve you if you’re black.
Hopefully, there’s good reason for that -- for more than fifty years, it’s been illegal for a restaurant in the United States to refuse service to a diner on the basis of his or her race, and culturally, doing so is simply unacceptable. But again, that wasn’t true a half-century or so ago. For an African-American family, traveling through certain parts of the country was difficult, as finding a place to eat or sleep which wanted your business could be hard to come by.
And before the law could catch up to the problem, a postal worker did.
The result: the Negro Motorist Green Book
http://nowiknow.com/the-negro-motorist-green-book/
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