In 1949, a black American planning a road trip may have packed more than a suitcase and a map. For 75 cents, some gas stations sold a publication called “The Negro Motorist Green Book.”
Money limits most travelers. Affordability and convenience help us choose where to stay, shop and dine. Not so long ago, all across this country, African-Americans were limited not only by the size of their budgets but by the color of their skin.
During Black History Month, I expect to read about the days when “whites only” signs were posted at drinking fountains and lunch counters in the American South. I never expected to see printed evidence that just five years before I was born, very few places right here in Everett were on record as welcoming black travelers.
“The Negro Motorist Green Book,” started in 1936, is described in an online research project by the University of Michigan called “The Automobile in American Life and Society.” The books were created by Victor H. Green, a black travel agent from New York, and sold in the Standard Oil Company’s Esso gas stations.
A 1949 edition of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” part of the collection in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., includes an introduction titled “The Green Book helps solve your travel problems” by Wendell P. Alston, of Esso Standard Oil.
“The Negro traveler’s inconveniences are many, and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling,” Alston wrote. “The Green Book with its list of hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, beauty shops, barber shops and various other services can most certainly help solve your travel problems.”
The 1949 book’s pages resemble the yellow pages of a phone book and include advertising. Some states and cities had dozens of entries. In Montana, though, just one “Tourist Home” was listed, a residence on Park Street in Helena. A single restaurant — Boise’s Union Pacific Greyhound Depot — was listed for all of Idaho in 1949.
Among Washington’s listings in the 1949 edition were many hotels, restaurants, taverns and barber shops in Seattle. A closer look shows they’re all in one area, mostly on Jackson and Madison streets.
The 1949 Green Book had three entries for Everett, all of them “Tourist Homes.” Outside of Seattle, not a single restaurant was listed in the state. There were no entries in Eastern Washington.
The Everett homes were at 22nd Street and Wetmore Avenue; at Hoyt Avenue and 36th; and at Rainier Street and 16th. Names listed with the addresses were J. Samuels, Mrs. G. Samuels, and Mrs. J.T. Payne.
Esther Hall Mumford, author of “Seattle’s Black Victorians 1852-1901,” said Friday that she believes one of the people listed with the Everett homes was a Ginny or Jenny Samuels, who was active in forming a state chapter of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in the 1920s.
Mumford, who is African-American, was raised in the South. She came to Seattle in 1961 to attend college. She hadn’t heard of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” but wasn’t surprised by its limited entries. “I grew up in the South under segregation,” she said. “Thank God for bus depots back then, but even bus depots were segregated.” Even in Seattle, Mumford said, “we couldn’t go into most restaurants.”
After World War II, she said, many who had come north for work during the war still retained attitudes from the segregated South. “People flocking north brought their own ways with them,” she said.
I hadn’t heard of the Green Book, either. It was 61-year-old Janet Koglin, of Stanwood, who ran across it on the Internet and called to tell me about it. “Isn’t it amazing?” Koglin said Friday.
As a young woman, Koglin had an inkling of what it’s like to be an outsider in a new place.
Born in New Jersey to Italian-Americans, she moved in the 1960s to a tiny town in North Dakota with her teacher husband, Glen. “I’d go shopping, and people would say, ‘Oh, you’re the Italian who moved into town.’
“It was quite an experience to be a minority,” Koglin said. “It gave me a taste.”
Learn more
“The Negro Motorist Green Book” was published for African-American travelers from the mid-1930s into the 1950s. To view pages from the 1949 edition, part of the Henry Ford Museum collection in Dearborn, Mich., go to http://tinyurl.com/motoristbook.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
