Navigating the Green Book
Location is Personal is a monthly newsletter by Mapbox, from the desks of Lo Bénichou and Amy Lee Walton. We’re exploring how the human experience shapes the spatial experience. In honor of Black History Month, we’re taking a look at black migration by navigating the original “Green Book,” discussing how, as builders, we honor and preserve history, and examining our collective responsibility for protecting human rights.
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How far do you drive each day? Where and under what conditions can you and your family eat? Where can they use a restroom? Will your children be denied a soft drink or an ice cream cone because they are not white? — Roy Wilkins, NAACP Executive Secretary in his testimony before the Senate in 1963
The Negro Travelers’ Green Book also known as the “Green Book” was written in 1936 to connect African American motorist and families to welcoming restaurants, hotels, and tourist homes as they traveled throughout America. Finding accommodations was one of the greatest challenges for black travelers due to Jim Crow and segregation. Traveling while Black could often result in arbitrary arrest and violence especially after sundown in many towns.
Victor Hugo Green, an African American postal worker, used his access to a network of postal workers and support from sponsors like local Black newspapers and Standard Oil gas stations (later Esso, now ExxonMobil) to ensure up-to-date information and promote and distribute the travel guide. Published from 1936 to 1967, the Green Book reached a circulation of two million by 1962.
Earlier this month, Mapbox hosted Navigating the Green Book, a conversation with the New York Public Library (NYPL) team that digitized the pages of this guide. Building an interactive experience based on sensitive historical material can be a challenging task. In choosing a trip planner, the NYPL team gave users a glimpse of the difficulties of traveling while Black during the Jim Crow era. Associate Chief Librarian at the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Maira Liriano, says, “I didn’t realize that by putting [the books] online, that it would capture the imagination the way it has and I think the mapping took it to the next level.” Brian Foo, one of the engineers on the project, created an algorithm that would require a traveler to only stop at places listed in the Green Book, promoting safety over speed.
That project got us thinking — what if today’s navigation tools were built to optimize safety over speed? An efficient route could mean something different from one user to the next. Users would select parameters and criteria to define the ideal route based on these conditions.
While in 2019 Jim Crow isn’t codified into law, discriminatory practices remain in full effect. From housing policies to individual unconscious (or blatantly conscious) bias, America continues to determine access on the basis of race, sex, gender, etc. Similarly, since humans build algorithms and computer vision, these tools can still have unintended biases. More specifically, we’ve seen issues with machine learning algorithms, some of which are actively being used in criminal courts for instance. The ways we build our products can have life-changing consequences and even reinforce systemic oppression.
So, as builders of location software, is it our responsibility to capture the societal realities of our times and integrate them into our products? What is a “standard” user? Who are we building for/with? And does it matter? Share your process with us. #locationispersonal
What we’re reading
- Listen to the 99% Invisible podcast episode on The Green Book.
- How giving algorithms a sense of uncertainty could make them more ethical.
- Play Parable of the Polygons to see how a little individual bias can lead to collective bias.
- The Copenhagen Catalog or 150 principles for a new direction in tech.
- Fast Company’s thoughts on how to reawaken humanity in business.
Who we’re following
- Candacy Taylor, author and cultural documentarian working on a project based on the Negro Motorist Green Book.
- Shellée Haynesworth, digital storyteller and director of Black Broadway on U, a digital platform preserving the black history, culture, & achievements between 1900–1960s in Washington DC.
- Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, writing extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music.
- Jessica Trounstine, Associate Professor of political science at UC Merced. Author of Segregation by Design & Political Monopolies in American Cities.
What we’re building
- Atlas Search — Build with address-level geocoding, even in offline on-premises infrastructure.
- We’re feeling the need for speed (limits) — learn how we’re building speed into Mapbox APIs.
- How we visualized 122 years of wildfire activity.
Developer Spotlight
Aaron Williams is a reporter who specializes in data analysis and visualization for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, he covered housing, campaign finance, police and local politics for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Aaron used Mapbox GL JS, turf.js and census data to measure and visualize racial segregation across the United States from 1990 to 2016. He spoke about the impact of this work at OpenVisConf in Paris last May.
Events
- Mobile World Congress 2019 | February 25–28
- GovSummit hosted by Mapbox | March 26
- Mapbox at Lesbians Who Tech SF | Feb 28 — March 2
Jobs
Location is Personal: Issue 2, February 2019 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.