"There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published." -- Victor Green, in the preface to the 1941 Edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book.
From 1936 to 1966 Victor Green, and later his widow Alma Green, edited the Negro Motorist Green Book which listed businesses that would serve black travelers without harassment or prejudice. Race or ethnicity of the business owner was not a criteria for inclusion in the listings. We examined 9 editions of the Green Book, and created an online interactive map of the 86 Detroit businesses.
The businesses were often grouped in African-American neighborhoods. Many of the Detroit locations today are underneath highways, Comerica Park and Ford Field. Other clusters of business can be noted in other parts of the city.
This project was undertaken to illustrate the power of combining multiple geospatial datasets to create insight into the past. The addresses in the Green Books were compared to Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which provide the road network and address system of that era. The latitude/longitude coordinates for each address were derived using Google Maps. The resulting spreadsheet of business locations was populated with further information about the former use of the space, the current land use, and a citation to the Sanborn volume and page.
Detroit provides a robust selection of business, and determining their locations with good precision met with few obstacles given the resources at hand. Many businesses in the Green Books, however, were located outside of cities. Summer vacation resorts, for instance, were often located in rural locations with no address provided at all. At that time, rural properties often didn’t have a mail address (merely a “Rural Route”) and are therefore now difficult to pinpoint. Researchers will have a greater challenge creating such an interactive map for the whole state or for the whole country.
The best known collection of Green Books available to researchers is at the New York Public Library.
Segregation in Detroit had created a densely populated neighborhood called alternately Black Bottom or Paradise Valley. This area was demolished and redeveloped in the mid-20th century into highways and sports venues.
Broad’s Club Zombie and the Champion Tavern were hot clubs located in the North End neighborhood. They hosted the biggest jazz musicians of the day. The Northend Tourist Hotel around the corner provided safe lodging for travelers.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, left; Google Street View, right. Club Zombie’s location is now a vacant lot to the left of the now-dilapidated Champion Tavern building.
Billie Holiday to perform at Club Zombie. Advertisement from the Detroit Tribune, Saturday February 6, 1943.