About this game
From 1936 to 1966, postal worker Victor Hugo Green published The Negro Motorist Green Book — an annual directory of hotels, tourist homes, restaurants, beauty parlors, drugstores, service stations, and other establishments where Black travelers could expect to be served, slept, and left alone. At its peak the guide listed thousands of businesses across the United States, Bermuda, Mexico, and Canada.
The Green Book was a quiet, practical document made necessary by Jim Crow segregation, sundown towns, and the everyday violence of American racism. It was also a record of a vast network of Black-owned and Black-friendly businesses, and of the families and entrepreneurs who built them.
This project is an educational role-playing game. It is not a substitute for the historical record. It is meant to give a small, immersive sense of the calculation and care that road travel required — and of the relief and joy of arriving somewhere safe.
Sources
- New York Public Library, Schomburg Center — The Green Book digital collection: scanned editions of the Green Book from 1937 through 1964.
- Historypin — Mapping the Green Book project: geocoded listings, photos, and community-contributed history.
- Driving the Green Book podcast (Macmillan): interviews and travelogue retracing real Green Book routes.
- James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005) — for the documentation of sundown towns referenced in the game's danger encounters.
Design notes
Listings shown in the game and on the Listings page are drawn directly from these sources. Sundown towns shown on the map (Anna IL, Vidor TX, Cullman AL, Harrison AR, Hermann MO) are widely-documented historical examples and appear in Loewen's database. Stat changes are dramatized; the underlying experiences are not.
AI-generated encounters are produced server-side with strict guardrails: era-appropriate, never gratuitous, slurs referred to but not printed. The journal labels each AI scene as procedurally generated.