Candacy Taylor: The Overground Railroad

Join Mahalia Solages and Jasmine Respess as they talk to Candacy Taylor about her new book "The Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America." In addition to the book, Taylor has helped put together a traveling exhibition with artifacts from her field research with the Smithsonian Institution and helped create a mobile Green Book app. The Green Book was a field guide for Black motorists that was popular from the 1930s through the mid 1960s. In their interview, Taylor discusses gentrification and some of the other forces that caused cities to lose many of their Green Book sites after desegregation made the book less popular. She discusses some of the artifacts she found on her travels to Green Book sites, and the importance of testimony from people still living today. The three also discuss how systems of oppression are still showing themselves under a different facade, and how racism is a multi-layered phenomenon that will take many years to heal.

Candacy Taylor is one of the featured authors at this year's 2020 Miami Book Fair Online. If you enjoyed this interview be sure to catch her presentation there. Encourage our independent bookstores, too! Get Candacy Taylor's book at Books and Books.

Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian. Her work has been featured in over 50 media outlets including the New Yorker and The Atlantic. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants including The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities.