Tracking the Negro Motorist Green Book

A Practical Guide for the Amateur Historian

Cherish Thomas

Page 58 →East Cheves and Jarrott.

“No.”

East Cheves and McFarland.

“No.”

East Cheves and Johns.

“No.”

I whispered quietly to myself, as I flipped through a collection of archival photographs, all of which were taken in the 1950s at the intersections of various streets in the predominantly Black neighborhood of East Florence.

East Cheves and Griffin.

“No.”

I was hoping to find an image of Ace’s Grill, which was located on the corner of East Cheves and Kemp Street. It was the first Florence restaurant to be listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book in 1949.

East Cheves and Ballard.

“No.”

East Cheves and Ives.

“No.”

East Cheves and Ravenel …

East Cheves and Fairview …

East Cheves and Kemp!

At last, there in a photograph and barely within frame was what may very well be the last existing image of Ace’s Grill.

I first became aware of Ace’s Grill and other Florence Green Book businesses several months prior. Like many others, I had seen the movie Green Book and became curious about businesses from my region listed in that important travel guide.¹ I decided to visit the Florence County Library and take a look for myself. As I skimmed through a copy of the 1953 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book, I discovered, much to my surprise, that several businesses in Florence were represented: Richmond Rest, 108 S. Griffin Street; Ebony Guest House, 712 North Wilson Street; Ace’s Grill, 114 East Page 59 →Cheeve² Street; Wright’s, 110 South Griffin Street.³ This discovery initially surprised me, as I had not expected a national travel guide for African Americans to represent Florence. However, I came to learn that Florence marks the halfway point between New York City and Miami, Florida, thus making it a convenient stopping point for weary travelers and that the Green Book featured eight local Florence businesses throughout its thirty-year publication. At the time, however, I simply wondered, Why Florence … ? What became of these businesses? I was eager to learn more, but after consulting with staff at both the Florence County Library and the Florence County Museum, I realized that public knowledge of these Green Book businesses seemed to begin and end within the pages of the travel guide.

Page 60 →The pursuit of truth is never without challenge. After consulting with these local institutions, I submitted my question to the unfailing wisdom of man’s greatest achievement of the twentieth century: Google. It’s one thing when human knowledge fails you, but despair knows no further depth as when Google fails you too! Therefore, I decided to take it upon myself to look beyond the digital and into the real world.

This essay is for those who wish to dig deeper and conduct their own Green Book research, as I did. Sharing tips and strategies from my own experience in researching local Green Book businesses, I hope to empower others to discover forgotten histories within their own communities. Although not an exhaustive account of my successes and failures, the essay provides practical tips for those getting started with Green Book research. My hope is to provide a guide from which others can grow, modify, and expand their knowledge in ways that are rewarding and useful within their own community.

New York City postal worker Victor H. Green published the Green Book from 1936 to 1966.⁴ Although the guide was modified over the course of its publication, each edition featured business listings arranged by state and/or country and city. The listings provided the name and address (sometimes only the street name) of the business being advertised. Before 1956, the Green Book also classified each listing into categories such as restaurants, tourist homes, service stations, barber shops, and hotels. Each new edition of the Green Book was updated to reflect changes as businesses closed, moved locations, or changed names. Other times, business owners may have chosen not to continue advertising in the Green Book. As such, I have found that when investigating Green Book businesses, researchers should first identify the number of businesses listed within the chosen city, the types of businesses listed, and the years in which each business was listed.

To complete this work, researchers will find The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture website indispensable. The Center is part of the New York City Public Library and includes digitized collections of poems, personal papers of historic figures, photographs, maps, and twenty-three digitized editions of the Green Book.⁵ To navigate, you simply click on the individual issue and flip through the pages as you would the pages of a physical book. From cover to cover, you can examine each page of each edition, organized by state and, sometimes, by county.

For researchers in South Carolina, the Historic Columbia website provides another valuable resource.⁶ The creators have curated a list of sites in the capital city. The National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation and Page 61 →the South Carolina Department of State Archives and History offer helpful information on sites that have been marked and researched by historians.⁷

Once you have identified sites within your area, a second helpful step is to place those businesses within the past and present landscape of your chosen city. It is often difficult to imagine the evolution of a city’s landscape when you are several decades removed from the source material. Very probably, the city looks different now than it did during the decades in which the Green Book was in print and its businesses in operation. When visiting the address of a local Green Book listing, you may discover that a parking garage now stands where you were expecting to find a barber shop. Similarly, if your GPS struggles to locate Griffin Street, it may be because Griffin Street no longer exists, as many older neighborhoods have been demolished and replaced by new businesses or roadways.

Real-world “field trips” to Green Book sites can be tremendously rewarding and valuable, but they often require a map published around the same time when the businesses were listed. Local libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies are all likely to have such maps within their collections, some of which may be accessible online. Comparing these older maps with current ones, you may find that a street name or building number has been changed or that the original addresses of the businesses no longer exist. For example, today there is no 100th block of South Griffin Street in East Florence. It was once located off East Cheves Street and was home to Richmond Rest until the late 1950s. It was also the site for Wright’s for a few years. These streets were located in the heart of East Florence’s residential neighborhood that has since become subsumed by the McLeod Regional Medical Center.

In addition to physically locating businesses on past and present city maps, Google Maps can also help to better orient your research. You may find that a business is still in operation or that a building is extant. Use caution, however, as Google Maps is a tool designed primarily to identify and locate present-day businesses, not those of the early to mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, once you have determined the present-day location of a business, the Street View and 360-degree feature of Google Maps can depict the state and exterior condition of the building and the land on which it was built. Often when navigating Street View, a building that no longer exists may appear, or a significant architectural change to a building may become apparent, such as the addition of a new wing of a house or the refurbishment of a storefront facade.

Page 62 →Google Street View may also be valuable for obtaining images of businesses that are no longer extant and in documenting their buildings’ architectural evolution. This was the case with Richmond Rest, a Green Book tourist home in Florence, whose first and second locations had been demolished before I began my research. By utilizing Google Street View in 2019, I was able to obtain images of the second location from 2012. Not only did these images provide insight into the physical characteristics of the tourist home, but also the “Image Capture” stamp informed me that the house was demolished sometime during or after 2012. It was this stamp that established a set of parameters into which I was able to channel the rest of my research.

Another helpful tool is a geographic information system (GIS) map, which is a type of map used to visualize and analyze landscape data. Municipalities commonly utilize GIS maps for city and county planning, zoning, and tax purposes. South Carolina’s Information Highway provides online access to current county GIS maps.⁸ The simplest means of searching a GIS map is by address, as you would with Google Maps. For Green Book researchers, GIS maps provide a bird’s-eye view of businesses and often list useful information such as tax map numbers, names of current property owners, and acreage. The maps also provide links to recent digital city and county property cards, tax assessor records, deeds, and plats. The offices of local tax assessors and clerks of court preserve hard copies of these records as well as older records. Before paying a visit to either, be sure to know the current address, the tax map number, and the names of the current owners of the property that you are researching. This information will allow you to research changes to the property and in ownership over decades. Organizational and indexing methods for deed and plat books vary from one municipality to the next, so be sure to consult with the staff on the proper procedures for searching the records. Records are generally available for public research free of charge, but offices may require an appointment. Typically, researchers can also print copies of records for a small fee.

City directories, often available for free at a local library or for a fee on Ancestry.com, have proven to be the most significant resources for my research. Cross-referencing Green Book listings with local city directories is the simplest method of verifying existing information and obtaining new data, such as years of business operation and changes in location, names of proprietors, and insights on tourist homes.

1. Years in operation and changes in location. Consulting a local city directory can help establish a window of operation for each business through which Page 63 →you can focus your research efforts. Begin by looking up each business in the directory for the year in which it first appeared in the Green Book, or the closest available year. From here, work forward and backward through the available directories. In doing so, you can confirm the first year in which a selected business began operations, as well as the year it closed. Changes in location also become apparent.
2. Names of proprietors. Identifying the names of Green Book proprietors is essential in telling the full story of their businesses and the culture they fostered. Some Green Book listings include the full names of the proprietors; others do not. Certain listings only include a partial name, such as “C. C. Godbold” or “Wright’s,” and other listings only include the name of the business such as “Spring Valley Motel” or “Ebony Guest House.” Crossreferencing the listed address in the city directories will often reveal the full names of the proprietors included in parentheses or brackets within the business listing.

   You will also sometimes find that the listed proprietor was employed in other work outside the Green Book business. For example, James Miller, the proprietor of the Spring Valley Motel, was also the principal of Holmes Elementary, Florence’s only elementary school for Black students. Miller’s wife, Marian, was the librarian for Florence’s only Black high school, Wilson High School. Likewise, Paul Wright, owner of “Wright’s,” was involved in multiple other business ventures that were never included in the Green Book. Establishing a “first-name basis” with Green Book proprietors also allows you to cross-reference their names in other resources such as census records, newspaper articles, and municipality records.

3. Insights on tourist homes. Occasionally, directory listings include the names of tourist home residents as members of the proprietor’s (homeowner’s) household. Although this information alone is useful, the inclusion of the resident’s name in the listing can provide insight into the physical structure of the tourist home and its operation. For example, the listing of a resident’s name in the directory implies that the resident had a separate mailing address from the homeowner. For example, residents of the John McDonald tourist home were listed in the city directories as residing in the “rear” of the house. This information suggests that paying residents lived in their own private section of the house, separate from the McDonald family, perhaps like a duplex apartment. This arrangement contrasts that of other tourist homes in which residents rented a room within the house and shared communal living spaces with the proprietor and their family.

Page 64 →Once you know the basic facts of each Green Book business, you can expand your research by investigating other primary sources. Databases and archives of primary resources such as newspaper articles, deeds, plats, postcards, letters, business cards, business records, photographs, and oral histories can help illustrate the broader social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which the Green Book businesses operated. The University of South Carolina Libraries and the South Carolina State Library have compiled a tremendous archive of historical newspapers, which is full-text searchable.⁹ Your local or state library, museum, historical society, or university are also excellent places to seek out primary sources. And remember, libraries can often provide free access to materials that may otherwise be blocked by expensive paywalls. You can find more information about these types of sources in the “Resources for Research” listing at the end of this article.

When researching, whether online or in person, try to be as specific as possible in your queries and requests. When visiting the library, rather than asking general questions about Mable’s Motel, inform the staff of what you already know: “I’m looking for information on Mable’s Motel. It’s listed in the Green Book as being located on Highway 52 in Darlington, SC. It was owned by Mrs. Mable Robinson and was in operation from the 1940s to the 1980s.” This detailed phrasing gives the library staff much more information to work with and can lead to a wealth of information. Perhaps there is a vertical file that contains news clippings of major events that occurred at Mable’s Motel or a photograph collection of businesses that once occupied Highway 52, or a report of a historic survey conducted on Black businesses in the city of Darlington in 1970.

The exception to the “be as specific as possible” rule comes into play when searching digital databases. Being too specific in your search often renders too few results, yet being too general can render an abundance of broad, irrelevant results. A good rule of thumb when searching digital databases is to search both exact names and phrases as well as any known variants of those same names and phrases. For example, when searching for names of people, such as “Mable,” “Lillie,” and “Catherine,” search also for alternative spellings such as “Mabel,” “Lily,” and “Katherine.”

This technique is especially important when searching census records, which are only as accurate as the enumerator’s auditory understanding of the name spoken, as well as the enumerator’s spelling and the legibility of their penmanship. Moreover, if a street has been renamed since the time the Green Book business was in operation, or if the street is commonly referred to by more than one name (e.g., “Cheeves” vs. “Cheves”), be sure to search for both. Remember, digital databases are only as intelligent as their algorithms! These subtle research strategies can unlock troves of relevant information that may otherwise remain undiscovered.

It is possible to conduct historical research and craft narratives apart from the communities in which your Green Book proprietors lived and worked, but having “boots on the ground” within the community and working to establish relationships with local residents will help establish an inclusive historical narrative. As the researcher, you should always take the initiative and reach out to individuals and community organizations with ties to your subject matter, be they relatives, friends, neighbors, religious institutions, or civic clubs. In short, you must get out and talk to people.

However, it can be challenging to identify a living participant or witness. If a living witness does, indeed, exist, there are scenarios in which engagement may be impossible or ill advised, ranging from a lack of travel funds to sensitivity of the subject matter. Nevertheless, when attempting to initiate contact, keep in mind that it is human nature to be wary of the intentions of strangers and those outside our own trusted communities. This wariness can become a roadblock for researchers seeking information from a community Page 66 →that is not their own. The following is a list of questions you should be prepared to answer when seeking to establish a relationship with a local community and while engaging with the community throughout the research process:

1. Who are you? What is your name? Where are you from? Are you representing yourself or a school/company/institution?—Be genuine and sincere. Do not presume that the influence of your personal reputation or the prestige of your institution is sufficient justification to gain insider knowledge and access. Always presume community members to be the primary authority on the subject. Address them with deference and humility, and be quick to listen rather than speak. Never act as if you are entitled to the information and resources that are within their possession.
2. What do you want to know or do? Whom or what are you researching? Why? What do you need from the community? Do you only seek information, or do you need access to tangible resources and spaces?—Be as specific as possible about what you wish to obtain from the community upfront.
3. What are your intentions? What do you intend to do with the information and materials once you have them? What is the end goal or finished product? Are you writing a book? Publishing an article? Giving a lecture? How involved do you or your institution expect the community to be in the research and in the formation and enjoyment of the finished product? How involved will you or your institution permit the community to be? What are the benefits for the community?
4. Money and publicity. Who is funding the research and the finished product? Will you or your institution be earning profits or garnering publicity throughout the research process or from the finished product? If so, will any profits be returned to the community? In what forms? Will the community be appropriately credited for their contributions to the finished project? Does the community desire to be credited for their contributions? How would they like to be credited?

Being open and transparent about yourself, your institution, and the purpose of your research helps establish and maintain trust. Often, unexpected circumstances will impede, delay, or halt your research altogether. This is not unusual. However, if this happens, be sure to maintain regular contact with the community and follow through with any claims or promises that you have made. Being in possession of information or resources does not grant you the authority to have your way with it, nor does it give you permission to abandon the community by cutting off communication or leaving Page 67 →promises unfilled. These are harmful, exploitive actions that will damage not only your reputation within the community but also the reputation of your institution. Such actions may hamper the efforts of future researchers as well. If you are ever in doubt about what to say or how to act when engaging with a community, remember to show respect, humility, and sensitivity for their perspectives. Doing so has always served me well.

The act of researching is, in my opinion, an objectively noble venture because it presupposes a finished product—an article, book, lecture, or historical marker—that furthers society’s collective knowledge of the subject matter and possesses the potential to inspire continued learning or action. Although both the act of researching and the creation of a finished product are worthwhile, I believe that equal value should also be placed on the relationships that are formed throughout the research process and those formed through sharing the finished product with others.

Historically and currently, individuals tend to hyperfocus on differences rather than similarities, which is particularly detrimental to forging and maintaining meaningful relationships with others and to advancing our understandings of history. In the broadest of terms, this hyperfixation on differences necessitated the publication of the Green Book nearly nine decades ago. Although we are no longer bound by segregation laws, one could argue that what the law once did for us we now do ourselves by means of self-segregation on the basis of cultural, religious, and political ideologies. As a result, the challenge of forging meaningful human connections is only compounded when attempting to form relationships with those from diverse backgrounds, as is often the case when engaging in historical work.

Throughout my time researching the Green Book, I have been honored to meet and engage with people from many different walks of life, whose livelihoods, zip codes, politics, faith, and skin color all differ from mine. They are people whom I likely would have never encountered had we not shared interest and appreciation for the subject matter and the work which was being done. These connections are where the true fruit of our labor as researchers lies: in our ability to build relationships with others across cultural, religious, and political lines, in uniting together with common interests and goals to bridge generational gaps, and in the strengthening of bonds through history, as a result of history, and even despite history.

As you embark upon your own research journey through the Green Book, I encourage you, above all else, to be mindful of the many interactions that you will have with others along the way and of the opportunities that each interaction will hold. Do not take for granted the people you encounter and Page 68 →the circumstances in which you may find yourself, however preplanned, unscheduled, inconvenient, or accidental they may be. History belongs to everyone, and everyone has a role to play in its recovery.