Preliminary Programme

For $0.75, African American travelers could be saved from the humiliations, embarrassments, and indignities of traveling in Jim Crow America. “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” offered black roadsters eighty pages of listings of friendly tourist homes, hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, beauty shops, barbershops, nightclubs, and service stations. As the opening paragraph of the guide stated, “With the introduction of this travel guide in 1936, it has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments, and to make his trips more enjoyable.” The last Green Book was published in 1965, but black travelers continued to rely upon it for decades. Postal worker Earl Hutchinson Sr. recalls his move from Chicago to California and writes of the Green Book, “you literally didn’t leave home without it.” Hutchinson and many other black migrants and travelers affirmed the guide’s tagline: “Carry your Green Book with you. You may need it.” The Green Book offers a glimpse at a critical resource that African Americans drew upon to negotiate and to navigate the constraints of Jim Crow America.
Historically, white supremacist regimes passed laws to limit the mobility of African Americans through Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. As one cultural critic writes, “Jim Crow created a geography of thwarted action, of arrested motion for African Americans.” Any form of movement that did not benefit the white power system was regarded as unnecessary, unproductive, and dangerous. From the earliest days of the automobile, racist laws, social codes, government regulation, and commercial practices have attenuated the mobility of black drivers. Black drivers encountered segregated roadside mechanical and medical aid; unwelcoming places for food and shelter, the discriminatory membership policies of motoring organizations including the American Automobile Association, and the profiling and harassment of black drivers by law enforcement. The Green Book created a geography hidden and invisible to whites yet apparent and instrumental to blacks.
I have been following the Green Book and traveling from New Orleans, Louisiana to Chicago, Illinois. This journey replicated the migration experience of my maternal grandparents who left New Orleans in 1945 in the hopes of finding a better life in Chicago. My grandmother’s most vivid memory was seeing a black man physically kicked off of a moving train. It is that memory, from almost 70 years ago, that is the first story that my grandmother will tell when asked why she decided to leave New Orleans. My grandparents traveled by car and drove straight to Chicago. They did not stop.
An article published in 1950 described the difficulty of black travelers in “gaining admittance to all but the cheapest of restaurants and the most flea-bitten of hotels” and explained that “travel for Negroes inside the borders of the United States can become an experience so fraught with humiliation and unpleasantness that most colored people simply never think of a vacation in the same terms as the rest of America.” Although the American resort business was a twelve-billion-dollar annual enterprise in 1950, there were only twenty black resorts in the entire country. Almost no white resorts allowed black travelers. Blacks could find accommodations in Yellowstone and many other national parks in the North and the West, but black tourists are not accepted on tours run by most travel agencies. Black actors arriving in a town where all black accommodations were already filled might have no other choice than to sit up all night at a railroad station. Some blacks had to request accommodations in local jails.
In the end, the Green Book did far more than alert black travelers to friendly lodgings, hospitable restaurants, and convenient places to get haircuts. The book drew on a common understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced when traveling. The Green Book belied the belief that the road was supposedly “a space democratic by definition since no class systems or unfair hierarchies exist there,” or as political theorist Charles W. Mills has written, “the ideal nonracial polity,” in which “one’s personhood is guaranteed, independent of race, and as such is stable, not subject to loss or gain.” The experience of African American migrants and travelers proved that the road was just the opposite. Indeed, the road was an anti-democratic space, a space where black travelers were subjected to near-constant anxiety and to innumerable losses, mostly painfully, the loss of the most basic citizenship rights and the loss of dignity. The open road, as it was often called, offered excitement and great adventure; it represented a utopian fantasy of freedom and individualism. But it was anything but “open” or utopian to those who it constrained and belittled.
For black travelers, the road’s only constant was uncertainty. The Green Book did not offer a radical challenge to the laws of segregation. Instead, it offered a guide for negotiating those laws, for getting past racial conscription, and equalizing the experience of travel, which is essential in the exercise of one’s citizenship and the attainment of individual freedom. (Show less)

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several Dutch and German merchants migrated from their homelands to the flourishing market town of Aalborg in the northern part of Jutland. The aim of my paper is to investigate how two of these merchant families, the Torsmedens from Northern Germany and the van Ginchels from the Netherlands, at first used their relatives, business partners and social contacts to gain knowledge about Aalborg before they choose to settle here permanently.
Just because the Torsmedens and van Ginchels moved to Aalborg did not mean that they became stationary. Their long distance migrations to Aalborg widen the geographical, economic and social horizons of their every day life. Often their children and grandchildren, inspired by the possibilities in their new hometown, moved on to new locations, new marriages and new occupations. Based on the probate records, judicial protocols, tax lists, accounts and parish registers from the seventeenth century my paper aims to reconstruct these movements and changing horizons of two immigrant families in Early Modern Europe. (Show less)

For most people moving home is a relatively rare event whereas mobility that facilitates everyday life is commonplace. Usually, such movements are seen as quite distinct, with little interaction between the apparently mundane movements that are undertaken every day and residential migration that, in some cases, can have life-changing consequences. In this paper we use a range of life writing from nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain to explore the mobility continuum that can connect everyday mobility and residential migration. First, the paper reviews relevant mobilities theories, often neglected by migration historians, to demonstrate how an argument for the connectedness of different types of mobility may be constructed. Using this framework, the paper then draws on a range of life writing to examine the nature and extent of such connections. Three main themes are explored. First, the ways in which everyday travel around a local neighbourhood provided information about potential locations and properties that might eventually become home. Such information could be gathered long before any intention of residential movement was formed, but could provide a reassuring store of information that could be used to ease a later short-distance move. Second, the life-writing examined also demonstrates the ways in which everyday search behaviour for a new home was often incorporated with other forms of mobility. Thus, a pleasant evening walk could be used to view a potential property, and an excursion to a potential new location could also become something of a holiday outing. Third, although everyday physical mobility could not contribute directly to longer-distance or international migration, information about potential distant destinations could be gleaned through everyday experiences both linked to physical mobility (for instance to exhibitions or other events that provided information about distant places), and though virtual mobility facilitated through news media and the like. The life writing examined can be used to demonstrate how some such information was acquired, stored and potentially used to generate later movements. Although not all movements were equally interconnected, and life writing can never reveal the entirety of an individual’s activities, we do argue that our understanding of the nature and consequences of mobility is enhanced by explicitly recognizing the connections that exist between residential migration and everyday movements.

Authors: Colin Pooley and Marilyn Pooley (Show less)