By Calvin Alexander Ramsey, Gwen Strauss
A Black family drives from Chicago to Alabama in the 1950s and keeps getting turned away, until a real travel guide points them to the places that will let them in.
Young Ruth is thrilled: her family is taking their new car all the way from Chicago down to Grandma's in Alabama. But the farther south they drive, the harder the trip gets. A gas station won't let Ruth use the restroom. Hotels won't rent them a room. Restaurants won't serve them. Ruth doesn't understand why until her parents explain, and then a kind Esso gas-station man hands them a real book, The Negro Motorist Green Book, that lists every place along the way that will welcome a Black family. Floyd Cooper's warm, golden paintings carry the whole trip.
It teaches segregation through the one thing every child understands, a car trip, and a full tank, and needing to stop. Instead of a courtroom or a march, the unfairness shows up as door after door that won't open, which is how a lot of children first grasp it. And the Green Book gives a class something concrete and almost hopeful to hold: real people made a real tool so families could travel safely, which is a different and welcome angle on the era.