Katrina Stack - PhD Student, Department of Geography & Sustainability, University of Tennessee, Knoxville & Research Fellow, Tourism RESET

This article includes excerpts from an interview with Christian Lowe, CEO and founder of The Green Book Project.

A couple years ago, I was taking a class on heritage preservation and tourism where we discussed the history of tourism in the United States  including The Negro Motorist Green Book. From 1936-1967, the publication created and published by Victor Hugo Green and his spouse Alma Green, helped Black Americans navigate travel throughout the country. Users of the guide could know what businesses, hotels, and gas stations were safe for them to stop at. 

After discussing the Green Book in class and learning about it further through other tourism and counter-mapping coursework, including an earlier Tourism RESET blog, I thought surely there would be a contemporary extension of the Green Book, perhaps in the form of an app. Through a quick Google search, I found The Green Book Project where the creator Christian Lowe agreed to an interview with me over Zoom. 

Lowe explained some of his own experiences with discrimination emphasizing that it was a study abroad program during which he anticipated experiencing the same kind of things he did at home in the United States. But instead, he surprisingly found himself feeling safer: 

I really saw firsthand how my friends were women and women of color, my friends who were queer, or my friends who were disabled from the wrong sociopolitical group, all had to still deal with those same kinds of forms of discrimination that I experienced.

 There’s an app for that, right?

 Upon returning from his trip, Lowe asked a friend who was interning at Google if there was an app to help people avoid discrimination and danger in their travels. Finding not one in existence, Lowe began to do his own research where he discovered the Green Book, and was “dismayed” to find that the publication ended in the mid-60s, “Like why? We still need this,” he said. A whole litany of people need this, he said:

It's not just Black people that have to deal with discrimination, but people who are women, people who are queer, people who are disabled. It's such a wide group of people that have to constantly worry, ‘Am I going to be safe?’ That was really what made me really dive into the history of the Green Book, and the necessity of some sort of modern version.

Viewing the app as an extension of the legacy of Victor and Alma Green, Lowe says The Green Book Project continues in the mission of the original Green Book:

I recall reading, in one of the covers, it says something along the lines of there'll be a time one day when this guide will never be necessary, and that will be a time when we will have equal rights in the United States… I really do feel like it's an extension of the same mission. It's really meant to really hit that home, that piece, making sure that no one has to live in fear of discrimination or feeling like they're out of place when they go new places.

 So, how does the app work?

Available for both Apple and Android devices, users can rate and review businesses based on their inclusivity and helps make others aware of their safety at various locations. Users can tag their intersections and identities to help other users who share them, while also tagging the businesses as Black, Women, LGBTQ, or Latinx owned, whether they have gender neutral restrooms, are wheelchair and accessible, and if they have changing tables. 

A crowd-sourced tool, Lowe says the goal is not for people to just identify spaces they cannot go, but instead to know where they can go:“What are the places where I will be welcomed and celebrated? We encourage our users to do is to leave really great reviews of the places that they do love. Like, if you find inclusive business, don't just keep it to yourself. Shout from the mountaintops that this place exists.” Eventually, Lowe and his team hope that the app can also help inform businesses if they have missed the mark or could improve in making people feel safe. 

The Green Book Project seeks to center voices of color and their social media also addresses how allies are important to the app. I asked Lowe how I, as a cis white woman, could contribute to the app to help others. While emphasizing that misogyny is “mad real” in this country, he said that an important piece of allyship in the app is looking out for each other. “I've benefited from in my life is having allies like friends who maybe don't have to worry about discrimination in their everyday lives, but they love me enough that they look out for it. There may be times when you are aware of discrimination taking place that someone else doesn't know.”

What are we still learning from the Green Book?

I finished my interview with Christian with a pretty big question—with his app, what are we still learning from the Green Book and how is this app accomplishing it?  

“I think a big part of it is that what discrimination looks like, what discrimination is, has changed a bit. At the time that the original Green Book came out, it was a likely scenario for Black travelers that if you made the wrong stop, you were going to get lynched or you were going to disappear. And I have family history that confirms that. I think a big lesson is just how discrimination has shifted. I do, of course, still worry about violence and facing danger as a Black man. Recent examples like Ahmaud Arbery and Breanna Taylor, obviously, top of mind. But a lot of discrimination is the death by thousand cuts discrimination. It's the little things that are done to make you feel unwelcome and out of place. So, I think we're trying to help people navigate the places you could go where you're not going to be told, whether explicitly or implicitly, you don't belong here, you're out of place, you need to leave. And I think that's one of the lessons that can be taken away from what the original Green Book…. What are the things that make people, that implicitly tells people they're not welcome? And what are the things that explicitly tell them that they are? And then also kind of helping allies and co-allies understand how to help one another.”

The Green Book Project is available on the App Store and GooglePlay. “And please leave a review of your favorite inclusive business,” Lowe said, “It doesn't seem like a lot when we think of leaving a review on Yelp, but the reviews on the Green Book Project app actually can save a person's life and can actually really change how a person has to go through their everyday outings.” 

To invest in the Green Book Project, please visit their WeFunder page.