First Thursday Gathering--July 2026

Join us for this FREE monthly gathering for food, fellowship, and learning! Registration is free, but donations are encouraged to support the work of our presenters. You can add a donation to your registration online, or you can donate when you come to the Forest for the event. The Forest will provide both a vegetarian and a meat main dish–please bring a side dish or dessert to share!

This month’s program will be “The Green Book Road Trip,” an immersive experience led by Mike McUsic and Sonya Wallace.

Here’s how they describe the experience:

The Green Book Road Trip trip tells the story of Black American road trippers in an experiential way. 

• First, we hand people the “Jim Crow Kit,” a collection of things people had to carry to insure their comfort and safety on the road. Including an abridged copy of the Green Book. 
• We set out on our trip, “start the car” and play authentic 1950s bebop music on the car radio.
• As we travel down the road, we start to look for a place to eat. We ask folks to look in their Green Books for places. When we find one, we show a1950s-era photo of the place and go in to the sounds of a diner. 
• We need gas, so we ask people to find a gas station. Again, we have authentic photos of 1950s gas stations. 
• By nightfall, we need a place to spend the night, so we look for a hotel or motel or B&B Tourist Home in our Green Books. 
• At our stop in Greenwood, we get gas at the Mince Gas Station at 2nd and Elgin, stay at the Small Hotel on Archer, and then go to see Count Basie at the Big 10 Ballroom.
• The experiences on the road help people begin to see that there were good times along the way of a treacherous journey, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Resilience in action.

Mike has researched the Green Book for ten years and has presented his work to the American Library Association, the Tulsa Library, John Hope Franklin Center, Route66 RoadFest, and the  Tulsa Historical Society. View Green Book Travelers at  https://www.historypin.org/collections/17932/ 

Sonya is an actress and librarian, who has extensive knowledge about how to dramatize history. 

With the Green Book Road Trip, we try to give people a sense of where white supremacy came from and how Black folks have used resistance to create resilience, both historically and today.