You don't know the story behind the green

In 1956, jazz musician Nat King Cole was invited to perform in Birmingham, in the southern United States.

The audience was all white, and nakingol was the first black person to be invited to perform in a white organization. As a result, he was pushed off the stage by the Ku Klux Klan and violently beaten at the beginning of his performance.

In the green paper, when the white driver wondered why don Shirley was going to perform in the south at this time, another musician told the story.

In the green paper, it is six years later, but when don Shelley and his trio team performed in the south, they also encountered all kinds of resistance and discrimination.

As shown in the movie, don Shelley, a black musician, is famous as a teenager. He lives in the concert hall like a "golden and resplendent" palace
In the north, he could have lived a life supported by thousands of people, but he would have come to the south to suffer this crime.

Perhaps, it's true that "it's not enough to be a genius. It takes courage to change people's ideas.".

In the 1960s, the black civil rights movement represented by Martin Luther King was surging, especially in the south. Before the Montgomery bus boycott incident, Little Rock incident, free passenger movement and other black events for racial equality were staged one after another, the 3K party in the South was active, and the white group's hatred of black people became more and more intense.

There was a burning smell of gunpowder in the whole southern air.
In 1962, just before the climax of the equal rights movement, don Shelley, a black musician, made a tour to the south, in which the story of the green paper took place.

The "green paper" in the title is a direct witness of this period of history.

The full name of the green paper is "the Negro motorist green book", which means a safe travel guide for black passengers. Its slogan is "now we can travel without embarrassment".
In 1936, Victor Hugo green, a postal worker in Harlem, New York, and his wife published the first green book.

In the book, they compiled restaurants, hotels, hotels and holiday destinations that were willing to receive black tourists at that time. After the first edition 36 years ago, the sales volume of this not thick green pamphlet soared.
It was not until the mid-1960s that this book gradually withdrew from the stage of history with the progress of the affirmative action movement.

Nowadays, few people have heard of the existence of the "green paper", but in the decades at that time, the green paper was regarded as the Bible of every black traveler.

Without it, travel can be humiliating and dangerous, especially in the southern United States.
Behind the convenience of the green paper, it actually pointed to the apartheid policy of "separate but equal" in the south at that time.

After the civil war in the 19th century, although slavery in the South was abolished, it did not change people's general idea of "white noble, black inferior".

With the emergence of new crises such as the economic depression in the north, people soon lost interest in the miserable situation of black people in the south, and racial discrimination in the south soon returned.
The constitution has abolished slavery and given black people equal rights. White people can only restrict black people's contact with them from other directions.

As a result, there is a high sounding policy of "isolation but equality".

From the beginning of Tennessee's railway transportation, they provided white and colored people with parallel, isolated carriages, separate seats among different races, or provided baffles to separate areas.

As a result, transportation, schools, bars and other public places in various states have followed suit. In the name of "African American" and "European American", blacks and whites have been separated from each other in space.

And the laws that govern apartheid have a notorious name, Jim crowera.
A few years later, a half breed named Homer placey rose up to challenge the bill and was arrested for deliberately riding in a white car.

After that, he took the state government to court. As a result, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy lost by a majority of 7:1.

As a result, "isolation but equality" has officially gained its legal status, and it has spread to all aspects of Southern life almost everywhere.

But in fact, "isolation" is real, but the so-called "equality" has never been.

For example, white children have all kinds of school facilities, while black children often have to go to churches, shacks and boarding houses to study. There is no toilet, no blackboard and other facilities.

In Florida's public education report in the 1930s, African American schools invested only 6% of white schools, and only 28 of Florida's 67 counties had African American high schools.

In the green paper, don Shelley can perform for white guests in a hotel, but he can't use a white restaurant, a dressing room or even a bathroom.

The dressing room for him is actually a small and outrageous grocery room. He can only go to the field to go to the toilet, eat in the opposite block, and stay in a black hotel.
"Segregation but equality" was legally abolished by the "Brown case" in 1954, but these scenes of segregation still exist even in 1962.
Heidi McDaniels, a black actress from gone with the wind, became the first African American actress to win an Oscar for her role as a wet nurse at the 1940 Oscars.

But under the Oscar stage, she can't sit with stars like Vivien Lee and Clark Gable——
Because of the isolation policy, she can only sit alone in a small corner.
And at the premiere of the movie, she couldn't even be on stage.

So, from the beginning of the affirmative action movement in the late 1950s, African American fighters have been aiming at segregation from the very beginning.

In 1955, a black woman in Montgomery was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for the white people, which triggered a boycott of buses by the black people;

In '60, four black students refused to eat at a white convenience store downtown, so they decided to sit in and protest until the restaurant closed.

Later, similar sit ins swept across the country, and large-scale black people began to occupy seats in public libraries, theaters, restaurants and other places.

In 61, with the support of the racial equality Congress, black and some white students launched the "free passenger movement" again. They rode by bus through the most conservative areas of Shennan.

On the way, they experienced the fierce siege, violence and threats of the 3K party, but the "free passenger movement" was completed in the relay of the students.

However, just one year after the story of Don Shelley's tour to the south in the green paper, Martin Luther King organized an extremely sensational large-scale demonstration in southern Birmingham. All over the country responded positively, and the grand civil rights movement reached its climax.

The "green paper" finally completed its mission in 1966 and withdrew from the stage of history after the publication of the final issue. The policy of apartheid gradually came to an end with the massive civil rights movement.

After decades of hard work, even the complete struggle in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the blacks in the South finally regained many of the rights they had been promised.