Notes from the Road: Documenting Sites Listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book

For the past three years, the three of us, Anne E. Bruder, Susan Hellman, and Catherine W. Zipf, have been ring-leading a group of scholars researching sites listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book or “The Green Book.” You might ask how we got involved in all this, but surely you already know. In typical fashion, it started small and snowballed spectacularly into a rich and fabulous project.

In case you haven’t heard about The Green Book, it was a pre-Civil Rights Act-era travel guide designed for African American motorists that listed safe places that would serve them while on the road. It wasn’t the only such guide; at least seven others, each aiming at different aspects of the African American travel market, took different strategies to this concern. But, The Green Book, published between 1937 and 1966–67, lasted the longest and served the largest audience. Right now, it is having a Renaissance, with its history highlighted in the film Green Book, released in 2018.

When Victor Green began publishing The Negro Motorist Green Book in 1937, segregation had been a fact of life of almost forty years. Green was a forty-four-year-old mail carrier in New York City and thus perfectly positioned to know where African Americans could and could not go. The first year’s guide covered New York City and listed gas stations and hotels as well as tourist homes (B&Bs) in the New York City vicinity. Green compiled these listings from his own experience and from those of his fellow mail carriers.

The Green Book rapidly took off. By 1938, just a year after beginning publication, Green expanded his listings beyond New York City to include cities and towns in twenty-one states and Washington, DC. Eventually, Green included Bermuda, Mexico and Canada, and finally a section for resorts listed by state. Churches and the Negro Urban League sold The Green Book, but the support given to it by the Esso (Standard Oil) Corporation was particularly key. Esso gas stations, one of the few that served African Americans, carried The Green Book at their stations as early as 1940. The 1949 edition even included an endorsement from Esso.

Ten years later, the directory covered forty-six states and had reached a print run of 20,000 issues, which would be its height. The published guide was quite small, about six by four inches, and easily fit into a car’s glove box. Over time, as the guide expanded, readers joined postal carriers in submitting listings, making it one of the first African American travel guides to incorporate user-generated content. Although the actual pages were modest and the listings spartan, inclusion in The Green Book was considered an honor.

While this publication history is fascinating, our project focuses on the sites themselves. It all began with an announcement from the New York Public Library that it had digitized all of The Green Book guides in its collection.¹ At the time, Catherine was writing a monthly column for The Providence Journal and thought Rhode Island’s Green Book listings would make a good topic, one that highlighted a history of Rhode Island’s architecture not often told. That article featured a fascinating site on Meeting Street in Providence and was published in February 2016.²

Enter Anne. Having seen Catherine’s article and having spent many years studying Maryland’s African American architectural history, Anne emailed Catherine to say that there was a much larger project here (“This is a cool topic”, Anne wrote) and volunteered to look into sites in Maryland. SESAH’s call for papers for the 2016 New Orleans conference had just come out and for the first time advertised a poster session. Together (but more Anne), the two conceived the idea of doing three posters, one covering the history of African American travel guides and two on the sites in Rhode Island and Maryland, respectively. We applied and were accepted.

We deliberately chose the poster...