Taylor assiduously retraces the Green Book’s history ... This was a grueling, faith-testing journey of loss and heartbreak that enlarges and shapes her book’s vision ... In scope and tone, Overground Railroad recalls Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns ... Taylor creates a vivid, multi-voiced travelogue, drawing on interviews, archival documents and newspaper accounts. Historic photographs provide context. Her contemporary images drawn from her travels...also play a dynamic, before-and-after role in storytelling. At its center, the book is a nuanced commentary of how black bodies have been monitored, censured or violated, and it compellingly pulls readers into the current news cycle.
... [an] electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book ... amazing ...Taylor generated so much fascinating material in working on this book ... Overground Railroad is an eye-opening, deeply moving social history of American segregation and black migration during the middle years of the 20th century.
... make[s] powerfully clear the magnitude of the injustices and harrowing encounters endured by African-Americans traveling by 'open' road, as well as of their quiet acts of rebellion and protest, which went far beyond having to find alternative places to eat, sleep and buy gas ... deeply researched ... a fascinating history of black travel as chronicled in the Green Book, the popular and essential guidebook for African-Americans founded by Victor Green in 1936 ... equally the story of vital black businesses that became safe havens and refuges along 'lonely stretches of America’s perilously empty roads' .. Taylor is not interested in presenting the Green Book as a time capsule. She wants to situate it within America’s 'ongoing struggle with race and social mobility,' and makes the disheartening yet persuasive argument that the problems African-Americans face today are 'arguably just as debilitating and deadly as the problems the Green Book helped black people avoid more than 80 years ago.' To prove her point, in an extraordinary feat of research, Taylor went on a nearly 40,000-mile road trip to visit 5,000 Green Book sites and photograph many of them.
Her exhaustive exploration illuminates a lost network of vibrant hidden communities. It also highlighted the distances between some ... At times, Taylor seems oddly apologetic for not having done enough with the project, as if her years of travel and research offered insufficient answers for the horrors they uncovered. But her book is a moving and needed history. The overt white nationalism of our era highlights the covert racism that never went away.
Taylor...focuses on the racism of white commerce and celebrates 'black travelers, armed with the Green Book,' who used their cars as 'a formidable tool that pushed the pendulum of equality forward.' At the same time, because it cannot ignore the current crisis of over-policing and mass incarceration, Overground Railroad wavers between commending and qualifying the efforts of black motorists and businesses. Left unexplained...is what happened after the midcentury struggle for equal access to public accommodations ... By focusing on the people who pursued equality in their cars and with their roadside businesses...Taylor miss[es] a larger story about the social and legal changes wrought by the automobile that ultimately led to the injustices cited at the end of [the book.]
An enriching look at African American history through the lens of the black motorist, and as one of the few books on the subject, this is essential for most collections.
