Join us for a discussion of the New York Times notable book Overground Railroad: The Green Book & the Roots of Black Travel in America. Author Candacy Taylor will be in conversation with Jacqueline Francis, Dean of Humanities at California College of the Arts. Originally published in 2020, Overground Railroad arrived in paperback in January this year. The conversation will be followed by a book signing. Copies of the book are available in the MoAD Bookstore.

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About the Book
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A New York Times Notable Book, Overground Railroad is the first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists used for decades when traveling through segregated America.

Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “Black travel guide to America.” It listed over 11,000 businesses, including everything from hotels to golf courses, real estate offices, and sanitariums. It functioned more like a Black Yellow Pages and was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem.

  
Overground Railroad delves into these Green Book sites and the history of America’s troubled past of segregation. It examines how we've arrived at our current moment and how far we still have to go when it comes to healing race relations and ending systemic racism in America.

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About the Speakers
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Candacy Taylor is the leading Green Book expert in the country. Her best-selling book, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, made the New York Times’ most notable books of the year, Oprah Magazine’s top 26 travel books, and National Geographic’s top 10 list of books by women. 

Taylor is a National Geographic Explorer, and her projects have been funded by the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Park Service, and the National Trust. Her work has been featured in over 80 media outlets, including The Atlantic, CBS Sunday Morning, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Fortune, and Time Magazine.

Taylor received her Master’s degree from the California College of the Arts and was a fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University under the direction of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. She then curated The Negro Motorist Green Book, a Smithsonian exhibition that toured 14 US museums from 2020 to 2026. 

Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, educator, and curator. She is Dean of the Humanities & Sciences Division and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Cultural Studies at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), and co-editor of several books, including Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023) and Romare Bearden: American Modernism (2011). In 2024, Francis co-curated an exhibition on modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson for the Huntington Art Museum (San Marino, CA). Among her other curatorial projects are “You Will Not Be Forgotten: Work by Adia Millett” (2024, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong), “Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life” (2023, Museum of Craft & Design, San Francisco), and Where Is Here (2017, MoAD). Francis is Secretary for the National Committee for the History of Art (the US affiliate of the Comité International d'Histoire de l’Art) and she serves on San Francisco’s Asian Art Commission. In 2001, Camara Dia Holloway and Francis co-founded the Association for Critical Race Art History, an online resource for scholars and students researching racialization as a project advanced in art and visual culture.

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