HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
This is a play NOT to be missed!
The play, a Theatrical Outfit production, set in 1953 Jefferson City, MO, is a new drama by Atlanta author and playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey being performed at Balzer Theater until Sept. 25th.
It begins when a black military officer, his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor spend the night in a “tourist home” together, only hours before W.E.B. Du Bois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. Brought together by the “Green Book,” a manual informing African American tourists of safe places to dine and lodge during the tumultuous Jim Crow era, these travelers and their hosts share a dramatic exchange that transforms their lives.
It begins when a black military officer, his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor spend the night in a “tourist home” together, only hours before W.E.B. Du Bois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. Brought together by the “Green Book,” a manual informing African American tourists of safe places to dine and lodge during the tumultuous Jim Crow era, these travelers and their hosts share a dramatic exchange that transforms their lives.
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HISTORY:
THE NEGRO MOTORIST GREEN BOOK, a travel guide that listed lodgings, tailors and other businesses that welcomed black patrons during Jim Crow.
The guide, which was launched in 1936 and published for nearly 30 years, found a readership because while blacks knew which businesses were friendly in their hometowns, it could be difficult to discern which restaurants, beauty shops and night clubs were off-limits or hostile when they were on the road.
Civil rights leader Julian Bond tells NPR's Neal Conan that he remembers his family using the Green Book "to travel in the South, to find out where we could stop to eat, where we could spend the night in a hotel or in somebody's home."
Bond, who served as chairman of the NAACP for 11 years, says that though the cover was green, that's not where the book got its name.
"It's actually named after the man who started the Green Book, whose name was Green," he says.
Bond explains that Green was a postal worker "who used his contacts in the postal workers union to find out where black people could stay" around the U.S.
At its height, Bond says, the book covered all 50 states, as well as a few countries.
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