This is The new film Green Book is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film so I can't speak to its merits or its shortcomings.

But while people are possibly being introduced to the concept of the Green Book for the first time, we thought we'd

re-released this story from a few years ago about the origin and significance of the Green Book,

the Negro Motorist Travel Guide to the Segregated U.S.

It's an amazing story and one of my all-time favorites.

As a special bonus in this episode,

will also be playing a green book story from Nate De Mayo of the Memory Palace.

Nate had coincidentally written his Memory Palace episode called Open Road about the

Green Book and we both released them without having heard the other and I think hearing them

one after another is a real treat.

It highlights our shows similarities and

differences in our approach to a subject. It makes me very happy to share them

together today. I hope you like it. This is the American dream of freedom on wheels, an automotive age traveling on time-saving super highways.

The 1940s, 50s, and 60s were the golden age of road travel. Cars had become cheap and roomy enough to carry families comfortably for hundreds of miles.

The interstate highway system had started to connect the country's smaller roads into a vast nationwide network.

Finally tourists could make their way from New York to California, with the windows down and the wind in their hair, seeing the grandeur of America along the way.

We have become the nation on wheels, with more motorized mobility than ever dreamed of before.

But of course this freedom and mobility wasn't available to everyone.

That's our senior editor and splash of cold water, Delaney Hall.

Because in 1956, the year that federal funding made the interstate highway system possible,

Jim Crow was still the law of the land.

In the South, racial segregation was enforced by law

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