Title: Ruth and the Green Book
Author: Alexander Ramsey Calvin, Gwen Strauss
Illustrator: Floyd Cooper
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Copyright: 2010
Number of Pages: 32
Genre: Historical Fiction
Grade Level: 4th
Content Area: Social Studies
Alexander Ramsey Calvin and Gwen Strauss wrote the book, Ruth and the Green
Book about a young girl’s trip to see her grandmother in Alabama in the 1950's.
Ruth is the young girl in the story. Ruth’s father had just bought a car, so
she was excited to travel in it with her parents. She found out very soon that
people outside of her hometown did not treat African American travelers very
well. One gas station they stopped at did not allow them to use their bathroom
and many hotels did not let them stay the night. They met a friendly attendant
at a gas station that showed them The Green Book. This book was a guide for
African American travelers on where they would be welcomes without hesitation.
They were able to spend the rest of the journey among friendly people and made
it safely to Ruth’s grandmother’s house. I would relate this book to Social Studies
and talk to the students about how different it was in that time and that we
should be so thankful for change. I would put the students in a group of three
to find a true story from that time period that relates to this story. Then I
would have them either act it out, draw a picture about it, or write a
summary about it. The illustrations help a lot to show that the story is
set in the 1950's.
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