Book by Robert P. Young III and Richard Lasser
Music and Lyrics by Charlie Barnett
Synopsis
Ridgewood, New Jersey, March 1965. Seventeen-year-old Dawn Jacks hears Dr. King on the radio and packs a bag for Selma, Alabama. She talks Rose Shapiro, the Jewish widow whose house she grew up in, into coming along. Dawn’s mother, Mary, has been Rose’s cook for nineteen years, and Mary’s brother Terrance, a World War II veteran, is Rose’s driver. Mary fled Mississippi and never wanted to go back, but she will not let Dawn go without her. So the four head south in Rose’s 1963 Buick with sandwiches, maps, and the Green Book.
A gas station attendant wants to see their money before he will pump the gas, then turns polite the moment Rose speaks up. The travelers keep their spirits up with songs and jokes. At a Green Book motel outside Charlotte, they promise to stick together as a family.
That night the radio reports that Jimmie Lee Jackson has been shot dead by an Alabama trooper at a voting rights march. Mary tells Rose they are going home. Rose refuses, and the fight turns ugly. Rose says she kept Mary on when Mary “got herself pregnant.” Mary answers with the truth: Rose’s late husband, Patrick, forced himself on her when she was seventeen. Dawn overhears. Patrick, the man she called Uncle Patrick, was her father. Mary kept the secret in exchange for his support. Terrance knew. Rose half knew and looked away. Dawn turns on all of them. In the morning she says she is going to Selma, with them or alone by bus.
They drive south in silence. A South Carolina state trooper pulls them over and orders them out of the car at gunpoint. An emergency call on his radio pulls him away before he shoots. In Selma, Terrance gives Dawn straight answers. Rose cannot. Mary says she will walk beside her daughter whether Dawn speaks to her or not.
On March 7, the four join hands and walk onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers attack with tear gas, clubs, whips, horses, and dogs. The four get back to the car beaten and bleeding. Terrance has a concussion and thinks he is back in the war. Dawn, who has no license, takes the wheel. A white hospital will treat Rose but not the others, and Rose refuses to go in without them.
In the parking lot of a colored hospital at daybreak, Mary tells Dawn that every choice she made, she made for her. Rose admits she chose what not to see. Dawn takes the car keys from her mother and sits behind the wheel. The four are still together, though none of them knows yet what kind of family they will be when they get home.