Guidebook that held blacks' hands during segregation reveals a deeply altered D.C. and inspires a play

Guidebook that held blacks' hands during segregation reveals a deeply altered D.C. and inspires a play: The old Holleywood tavern at Ninth and U streets NW, one of just eight bars in Washington listed as open to blacks in 1949, is now the indie-rock bar, DC9. Where the Brass Rail restaurant once served blacks who were excluded from most downtown eateries, there is now a day-care center for toddlers and infants. Green's, a beauty parlor on 18th, south of U, is now a Peruvian restaurant.

Half a century after the edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book with those D.C. listings was published, playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey stumbled upon the book, which was once a kind of Fodor's Black America - a travel guide for African Americans road-tripping in an era of racial segregation.

Ramsey was at a funeral in Atlanta eight years ago when an elderly New Yorker first mentioned the book to him. That exchange launched Ramsey on a journey that arrives Wednesday at the Lincoln Theatre for a Green Book-centered night including a reading of his play, also called "The Green Book." Ramsey has also written a children's book about the guide that became the bible of black travel during Jim Crow - and he's making a Green Book documentary, too.