I can’t wait to read this book for obvious reasons. I’ve seen great reviews for it already. Black history researched and told by Black people with a clever title to boot. It comes out Jan. 7, 2020. Oh and fuck that whitewashed, white savior movie, Green Book, for the umpteenth time.
The book’s blurb:
The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists
Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “Black travel guide to America.” At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor
A fascinating deep dive into The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide that was self-published by a small press from 1936 to 1966 with lists of businesses around the country that had been verified safe for black travelers during America’s shameful era of racist Jim Crow oppression. Author Candacy Taylor offers a chilling depiction of the bigotry and violence that could be expected at a typical white-owned establishment of that period, but she mostly walks readers through a history of the text and how it changed across successive editions.
Although the narrative can sometimes feel like just a catalog of entries itself — and the writer occasionally wanders into digressions of related but off-topic social ills like racial disparities in mass incarceration — it’s a pretty thorough look at the hotels, restaurants, and more that were recommended by Victor Hugo Green and his team over the years, as well as updates on whether / how these places can still be found today. Complemented by interviews with elderly African Americans who either used the Book or were featured in its pages, this title provides a capsule of black existence that was critical for its contemporary audience yet rarely documented in the mainstream culture.
[Content warning for slurs.]
★★★★☆
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“Overground Railroad,” by Candacy Taylor, and “Driving While Black,” by Gretchen Sorin, chronicle the dangers for black Americans on the road during Jim Crow, and the travel guides that assisted them.
Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor https://amzn.to/2SzgrGh
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin https://amzn.to/31YqQy1
Cool Culture recently had the chance to interview Candacy Taylor, a writer, photographer, and visual critic whose mixed-media projects center largely around aspects of American culture, identity, and labor that are often overlooked. Her work includes Counter Culture in which she explores the lives of American career diner waitresses and American Roots (formerly American Hair) where she documents salons across the country and investigates the role hair plays in shaping identity.
Check out her website and twitter and read on for our interview...
In your work you serve as an artist, journalist and documentarian. Do you feel that the divisions between these roles matters for your work?
I think it's difficult to put yourself in a box and that's what I always try to avoid. I don't believe that I am a journalist in the traditional sense because I am more of a cultural critic. I am making some connections based on history and based on scholarly research and lots of other things.
So you think of journalism as more of the moment and your work is more about the spanning of time?
I believe that especially with Counter Culture and with American Hair, I could not have done them without oral histories and the interviews. The interviews are very journalistic in nature, but all of those have background research and philosophy and theory that goes into understanding how power works with women and labor or women and beauty and image and identity. Those are such big components of why I choose to say what I say and how I disseminate the project, whether it is going to be an exhibit or a film or a book. So journalism is generally narrower… because you’re creating a story for a very specific audience over a specific time. I prefer that I work beyond just that specific moment if that makes sense.
(Rachel Lelchuck at Louis’ Restaurant. San Francisco, CA)
I wanted to ask how you decide upon your subject matter. In your bio you say that you have “The heart of an artist and the mind of a businesswoman” and I was wondering if that duality made you particularly interested in doing projects about laborers, or particularly about people who could be marginalized or undervalued because of gender or race or sexual identity? Do you think artists in America occupy similar roles to the subjects of your work?
The way I find my subjects usually starts with me on some level, I have to admit. I was waitressing my way through graduate school, which is why I started Counter Culture. I couldn't believe how physically intense the work was and I thought, “How do these women who are in their 80s do this job? And how do they feel about having done this job their entire lives? Are they bitter?” That’s what inspired me to look at these older women; and the criteria for that was very specific: They had to be 50 or older, working in diners or coffee shops, not upscale restaurants, and they had to be in a place that had a large regular clientele because I wanted to know about their impact on the community. What I found out later was one of the reasons why they stayed so long is because of the connections and the relationship that they were building in these places.
I have always cared about being a woman-- I am a black woman, and labor and being an artist and the idea of how labor affects my life and my work. These issues have driven my work. But I do believe that it is increasingly difficult to be an artist, especially when you are providing content in a world where people are getting used to not paying for content, so it’s challenging. I feel like it is also an extension of women and labor. Women have never really made the same amount of money and their work has been undervalued in society.
But the most exciting [part of my work] for me, is when I stumble on to something that is the opposite of what the general belief system is. With Counter Culture, it was amazing for me to realize after doing interviews for about 5 years, I had all of these waitresses tell me that they loved their jobs and they wouldn't do anything else and they made a good living financially, that they made more money doing that than if they were nurses or secretaries or other jobs that were available to them without a college degree. I learned that even women who had college degrees felt like they could make more money waitressing. And that was really surprising to me so I thought that was a story that needed to be told. Those are the kinds of things that drive my work, turning the assumptions that we make in society on their heads and having people redirect their focus a little bit and think a little differently about something that is the standard belief system.
(Sondra Dudley at the Butter Cream. Napa, CA)
Because you often work with these very iconic American figures, like a diner waitress or a hairdresser, did you ever feel the impulse to fictionalize, or like you wanted someone's narrative to be a certain way to fit in with what you expected? And how would you fight that impulse?
I had to get out of my own way, because the stereotypes do get into our psyche. And especially with waitresses, there are just so many media images of them and there have been for a hundred years, a constructed icon of what these women are like. And I thought "Oh my gosh. You know, no, these women don't really have beehives and they don't chew gum and they are very real." And it was refreshing honestly to do that. But I was hoping that the audience that I was writing to or presenting this to would get the essence of why these women were special without them looking like stereotypes.
So that was challenging at first, because when I was first doing interviews, I thought "I wonder how I am going to present this." Because for me, my work has always been about generating as wide of an audience as I can and making it exciting for them.
And with the American Hair project, there’s a stereotype that people want a certain look, that being blonde and having straight hair is preferred over kinky hair. [I] challenged that, asking where did that come from and is it really true? Why does that matter? And in what circles does that matter? And how has that changed from what we see today? Because our belief systems and what we see are often two different things; but our belief systems are so engrained in our psyche.
(Miss Mia at Hairplay. San Francisco, CA)
I wanted to return to something that you brought up before about free media and how that has affected artists. What’re your thoughts about that?
I just encourage artists, no matter what stage of your career you are in, that you have to be paid, even if it is minimum wage. If you're early in your career, then you ask to be paid at least minimum wage. And don't just offer to do things for free. I think more people have to come up with a reason why they believe they should be getting this content for free…It’s really incredible.
I have a final question for you, which is something that we ask all of our interviewees, do you have any specific childhood memories of cultural visits or museum visits that you felt were particularly formative or moving?
I remember my father taking me to the Chicago art museum and putting me on the huge lion sculpture there at the front steps. That was my first introduction to a museum, and I just remember loving that space. I was probably about five years old; I was really young, and was just overwhelmed by the space, this place that was dedicated to beauty or to knowledge. I just thought, "Wow it’s amazing these places exist."
However, ironically, in my work, I really want to produce work that hits the masses and that is not necessarily in the institution. For the American Hair exhibit, I envisioned it as having these venues that were everyday places, like malls, casinos, or airports. I really wanted to hit those everyday places that people just go through and may or may not think that they would see art there. For instance, my next exhibit will be at the Miami Airport in 2015.
