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Friend,
As a young boy, Roger Ross Williams would travel with his mother, a single woman who worked as a house cleaner in a small Pennsylvania town, to visit relatives on their farm in Charleston, South Carolina.
“We would pack everything into the car, and we did it in one shot. We never stopped. I never understood why,” Williams, who grew up to be an Academy Award-winning movie director, recalled in an interview released by his film production company.
As an adult, Williams said, he realized why his mom drove 12 hours without a break: “It’s just the reality of being Black in America.”
That reality is the subject of a bold, genre-bending 3D film experience directed by Williams that will be shown at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, starting Nov. 1 and running until Jan. 22, 2023. The project, “Traveling While Black,” uses high-concept documentary and virtual reality technology to immerse participants into the terrifying world of the United States during legal segregation.
Stepping into an exhibit space set up as a replica of the iconic, Black-owned restaurant Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., viewers will don Oculus Go headsets and, for 18 minutes, join conversations with patrons depicted through virtual reality technology who share their intimate experiences of traveling and living in the U.S. when a simple bathroom stop could be life-threatening. The virtual reality project portrays the era Williams, now 60, was born into in 1962, when the set of laws and customs known as Jim Crow were omnipresent across the American South, and when Black people faced persistent racial prejudice, price-gouging and physical violence while traveling throughout the U.S.
With Black travelers aware they went on the road at their peril, a guide published from 1936 to 1966 became their lifeline to finding establishments, like Ben’s Chili Bowl, where they would be welcomed rather than threatened or turned away. The guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book, was the brainchild of a Harlem, New York-based postal carrier, Victor Hugo Green, who had grown weary of the discrimination Black people faced when they left their neighborhoods. It provided a list of hotels, boarding houses, taverns, restaurants, service stations and other establishments throughout the country that served Black patrons. Traveling while Black required ingenuity and courage, and establishments like Ben’s – with its famous half-smokes, chili dogs and milkshakes, and its role at the heart of the vibrant area known as “Black Broadway” – were safe spaces, respites from the reality of white supremacy.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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