Lets say you were an African-American living in the United States decades before the Civil Rights movement. You wanted to take your family on vacation out of state, but didn’t know what businesses were safe to stay at. You couldn’t just walk into any hotel and ask for a room! This little guide became a literal life saver during the mid 1900’s! Called the Negro Motorist Green-Book, it led African American vacationers and business travelers to safe businesses that would be accepting of them and their families. These guides are highly collectable and rare. I found a couple on the Internet Archives website, but only the 1940 edition mentioned Monroe:
https://archive.org/details/TheNegroMotoristGreenBook194026
To read about the Green Books, go to Wikipedia and read their article here:
Ouachita Parish History Tidbits 