Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay? Thank you so much.

Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share, because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. All right. So today feels a little weird to me. This is actually the second version of

this podcast that we are recording on today, which is Wednesday, September the 17th, because during

the show, so much of the information that we were reporting on in the first version of the podcast,

which we recorded before the show, changed literally in the middle of the conversation.

So let's just start here. I'm going to need

everybody to be crystal clear that right now Green Book rules are in effect. Now, if you are too

young to know what Green Book rules are or you just perhaps aren't necessarily connected with this

aspect of Black history, regardless of your age, the Green Book was kind of like Black people's

GPS during the days before we had cell phones or GPS capacity.

And what I mean by that is we would, back in the day, before we had, you know, Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever mapping device you use ways, whatever, we would have this thing called Yahoo Maps, like Yahoo.com slash Maps, I think was the website.

That was considered a breakthrough. That and sort of things like MapQuest, these were brands that were considered breakthroughs, because before you had the internet, when you were traveling, you would have to have a map in your car, sometimes called an Atlas. And I remember being a kid, and my daddy taught me how to read maps and basically you wouldn't be able to say

door-to-door directions you would just know that all right if I'm on this road this road leads to the

highway and according to the directions on the map I'm going to go to my left not my right and you would

literally have to have this very intimate relationship with a physical map a handheld map almost like a

really big magazine book that would then guide you throughout the country. The reason this mattered was because if you were black and traveling throughout the country, particularly in the, you know, in the early 1900s, 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and 60s, and so on. And, well, you'll see in just a minute, even up until today, you would have to have a special sort of map because black people couldn't stay in every hotel. They couldn't go to every gas station and get their car filled up. They couldn't stop before we had cars. They couldn't stop at every, you know, watering trough and let the horses drink from the water because if you were in a racist town, you might not make it out that town. We had these things called sundown towns. It's weird as I just said had as if it's past tense. We still actually have sundown towns. And these are towns where if you are caught in the town, in the boundaries of the town, by the time the sun goes down, honey, it's a good chance you might not make it to see the sun rise because the white racism was going to basically end your life.

And so we had this thing called the Green Book.

Now, the Green Book would basically say, listen, if you're traveling through, say, Mississippi,

here are the towns within Mississippi that you can stop at safely and find a hotel or a boarding room

or some sort of overnight lodging space where you will be able to stay.

Ain't nobody going to bother you. Here are the roads that you be able to stay, ain't nobody gonna bother you.

...