About the Author

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. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Reviews

"Overground Railroad is an extraordinary reckoning with the America that whites have always believed existed, and with the America that blacks actually experienced, navigated, and made theirs despite every barrier."--Heather Ann Thompson "Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Lega"

"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 twentieth-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 "author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois"

"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 United States 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 reorients the narrative of allure surrounding Route 66 in order to account for the grim reality of the violence that black people faced on that old American road." -- "The Atlantic"

"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 drugstores and gas stations. 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 "author of The Truly Disadvantaged"

"With passion, conviction, and clarity, [Candacy] 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 underappreciated."--Brent Leggs "Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund"