OVERGROUND RAILROAD
THE GREEN BOOK AND THE ROOTS OF BLACK TRAVEL IN AMERICA
Overground Railroad was chosen as the New York Times’ most notable books of the year and made the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List, Oprah Magazine's top 26 travel books, and National Geographic’s top 10 list of books by women.
NEGRO MOTORIST GREEN BOOK EXHIBITION
The exhibition, “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” curated by Taylor, is based on Overground Railroad and being toured by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service from 2020-2025.
Washington State Historical Society Museum - Tacoma, Washington
GREEN BOOK PROJECT VIDEO PRODUCED BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Chuck D - Public Enemy
GREEN BOOK PROJECT FEATURED ON CBS SUNDAY MORNING
THE GREEN BOOK PROJECT
The project consists of a book, a children’s book, a traveling exhibition, and a forthcoming mobile app.
Taylor has been researching the Green Book since 2013. She has cataloged over 11,000 Green Book listings, nearly 7,000 Green Book sites in 48 US States, and photographed nearly 300 of them. The fact that we have these buildings as physical evidence of racial discrimination is a rich opportunity to re-examine America’s troubled history of segregation, black migration, and the rise of the black leisure class.
This project has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Hutchins Center at Harvard University (under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr.), The Library of Congress, National Geographic, The National Park Service, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Graham Foundation, The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Taylor’s work has been featured in over 80 media outlets including The Atlantic, CBS Sunday Morning, The Guardian UK, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, PBS Newshour, and The Wall St. Journal.
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“If ‘making a way out of no way’ is a theme that runs throughout African American life, few things encapsulate that theme more powerfully than The Green Book. A symbol of Jim Crow America, it is also a stunning rebuke of it, born out of ingenuity and the relentless quest for freedom. Candacy Taylor’s own quest for Green Book sites throughout the U.S. reveals her own relentlessness as well as a potent gift for bringing these sites, and the black past, alive.”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
“Overground Railroad is an extraordinary reckoning with the America that whites have always believed existed, and at the America that blacks actually experienced, navigated, and made theirs despite every barrier. The rich history and the personal narratives rescued on these pages, as well as the vivid photographs of people, places, and memorabilia rendered so beautifully throughout, are a true gift from author Candacy Taylor.”
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy.
“With passion, conviction, and clarity, Taylor’s book unearths a fascinating and true -- if not willfully obscured -- history of African American activism and entrepreneurship in the United States. This remarkable study broadens our understanding of Black life, leisure, and struggles for equality in twentieth century America, presents the Green Book as a social movement in response to a crisis in Black travel, and makes a compelling case for the need to protect more diverse African American sites that have been heretofore under-appreciated.”
Brent Leggs, Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, National Trust for Historic Preservation
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
To request an in-person or virtual speaking engagement, please contact Authors Unbound, or view my SPEAKING PROFILE.
”Published during the period of Jim Crow Segregation, the various editions of the Green Book identified establishments willing to serve blacks, ranging from hotels and restaurants to drug stores and gas stations. Candidacy Taylor's The Overground Railroad carefully places these operations in their historical and geographic context, and provides a wealth of useful information not only for social scientists, historians, students, and journalists who want to examine important aspects of the changing black experience, but for general readers as well.”
William Julius Wilson, Harvard University; Author of The Truly Disadvantaged
”Candacy Taylor's cleverly titled, heroically researched Green Book travelogue should be indispensable reading. The Underground Railroad carried tens of thousands of slaves to freedom. Taylor's Overground Railroad transports their 20th-century descendants to the Jim Crow reality of a hypocritical country. Her stunning book compels us to wonder where the ride is taking all of us now?”
David Levering Lewis has written about the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King, and W. E. B. Du Bois which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.