Saturday, February 26, 2011

Travel guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times - CNN.com

Travel guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times - CNN.com: Ernest Green hit the roads of the segregated South as a teen in the 1950s, using a travel guide that pointed out safe havens where African-Americans could eat and stay.

The pamphlet promoted vacation without humiliation.

On that trip in the 1950s, Green journeyed the 1,000 miles from Arkansas to Virginia with his mother, aunt and brother to attend his sister's college graduation. His aunt and mother used the travel guide to plot the entire trip.

'It was one of the survival tools of segregated life,' Green says.

Ernest Green became a symbol of the civil rights movement as one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who braved death threats and harassment to become the first black students at Central High School in the Arkansas state capital in 1957.

A man with the same last name, but no relation, was behind the African-American travel guide, an institution among black families as they traveled the nation at a time when many businesses wouldn't allow them inside.