African-American Tourism and Travel to the Holy City

The Short List of Green Book Sites in Charleston, South Carolina

Barry L. Stiefel

Page 35 →Starting in the 1920s, Charleston, SC, developed a budding tourism economy based on its historic sites, a by-product of the Charleston Renaissance (1918–1941), a period that lasted between the First and Second World Wars when the city experienced a flourishing in the visual arts, literature, and historic preservation that celebrated Charleston’s culture and past. Although interrupted by World War II, touristic boosterism continued soon after, but with a very European American–centric perspective of the city’s history that excluded the African-American perspective on the past. For example, the Old Slave Mart Museum had an incredibly offensive exhibit on antebellum slavery, depicting it as a positive experience. Even though the Mart had been a place for buying and selling people, when the museum opened in 1938, the exhibit’s founder Miriam Wilson, showed her beliefs that slavery was not brutal and was mainly a way to civilize Black people.¹ Other sites were simply not accommodating, such as the Charleston Museum, which began in 1917, (re)allowing African-American school children accompanied by a teacher to attend when they had a reservation. However, African-American adults who were not part of a school group were denied admission.² Using the Negro Motorist Green Book (hereinafter called the Green Book because of variations in titles that evolved over the years) as a lens for viewing the African-American experience, this article will investigate the interface of white supremacy with Charleston’s twentieth-century touristic image and what we can learn from the handful of Charleston-area amenities listed in this directory. With this historical context, preservationists and public historians can better identify and preserve sites related to the Green Book in Charleston.

Because of examples such as the Slave Mart Museum and Charleston Museum, the city’s touristic experience was not attractive to African-American people from elsewhere, and so few came. Charleston was South Carolina’s largest city during this period, yet the 1946 edition of the Green Page 36 →Book lists only five “tourist homes.”³ A tourist home was similar in concept to a bed and breakfast, where African-American travelers could find lodging and one meal a day. These five locations were the only listed amenities in the Green Book for 1946, indicating that not many out-of-town African-American visitors could be accommodated at any time. This is in comparison with other South Carolina towns with lower populations, such as Columbia (with forty-one listings), Greenville (nine listings), Mullins (ten listings), and Spartanburg (fourteen listings), which had a greater number of listed amenities in 1946 and in other years.

Circa 1930, on the eve of the first publication of the Green Book, just under fifty percent of Charleston’s population was African American, but these residents would have only needed this directory when traveling to other places.⁴ The lack of Charleston-area amenities listed in the Green Book is not a reflection of African American–owned and friendly businesses in the city. Although the Green Book listed a few other Charleston businesses in other years, such as the James Hotel and Brooks Grill, the total number of business listings was always small. For example, Harleston’s Tavern was Charleston’s only restaurant mentioned in the Green Book for 1946, but thirty additional restaurants for people of color are listed in Charleston’s 1946 city directory.⁵ Thus, there were many places where African-American people could go out to eat in Charleston; however, it appears that customers at restaurants for Black people were primarily local and not travelers from elsewhere.

As late as 1977, after the Green Book had ceased production, local African-American businessman Arthur Clement Jr. observed “in Charleston there are no Negro tour guides, no brochures, no pamphlet handouts put out by the Chamber of Commerce nor any other local tourist group” even though the “Negro tourist in America last year spent some $400 million in plane fares visiting places around America. When you add hotel, motel, and entertainment expenses, the total outlay reaches astronomical proportions.”⁶ So, although there were African-American tourists and travelers, they did not come to Charleston in large numbers, despite the city’s large African-American population.

Since the nineteenth century, people of African descent have taken an interest in being a part of Charleston’s tourism industry. As early as the 1810s, free Black man Jehu Jones Sr. established the Jones Hotel, which he and his family ran as a successful business for decades. Jones also established a second resort hotel on nearby Sullivan’s Island as well as another in New York. The Jones Hotel served wealthy European American and European travelers, and the service at the Jones Hotel was so well reputed that the enslaving Page 37 →elite often had their enslaved cooks apprentice at the hotel.⁷ Thomas Hamilton of Scotland, who visited the Jones Hotel in the early 1830s, claimed:

[e]very Englishman who visits Charleston will, if he be wise, direct his baggage to be conveyed to Jones’s hotel. It is a small house, but everything is well managed, and the apartments are good. Our party at dinner did not exceed ten, and there was no bolting or scrambling. Jones is a black man…. The pleasure of getting into such a house,—of revisiting the glimpses of clean tablecloths and silver forks,—of exchanging salt pork and greasy corn cakes [fare of travel], for a table furnished with luxuries of all sorts,—was very great. For a day or two, I experienced a certain impulse to voracity, by no means philosophical; and sooth to say after the privations of a journey from New Orleans, the luxury of Jones’s iced claret might have converted even Diogenes into a gourmet [emphasis original].⁸

Free Black woman Eliza Lee established the Mansion House Hotel during the antebellum period to compete with the Jones Hotel, which had an equally commendable reputation. She and her husband eventually took over the Jones Hotel in 1852. Despite Black ownership of the Jones Hotel and the Mansion House, Black patrons were likely not guests at these establishments because of the period’s racist expectations. There were also too few free Black people with wealth to sustain a segregated hotel for their demographic.⁹ Indeed, Prince Carl Bernhard, of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, observed during his visit to the Jones Hotel in 1825,

I took up my abode at the Jones’s Hotel, a well supported and finely situated house, whose host was a mullato [sic]. In consequence of [the Denmark] conspiracy among the slaves a few years previous [in 1822], supposed to have been instigated by colored people … very severe laws were passed, and no free colored person having once crossed over the boundary of the State was allowed to return…. I was informed that if I had brought a free black servant with me, he would have been put in custody till I left the State, or I must deposit a considerable security for him.¹⁰

Prince Bernhard’s testimony highlights the high level of risk for a free Black person to travel any great distance in the early United States. Prince Bernhard also observed that Mrs. Jones, Jehu’s wife (first name not provided) and a free Black woman, was marooned in New York City for years because of this situation. She had traveled to New York City to visit family shortly before the Page 38 →Denmark Vesey conspiracy and now “dared not attempt to return home,” out of fear of what harm could come to her, including re-enslavement.¹¹ Jones’ son, Jehu Jones Jr., had an interest in museums and mentions in passing visiting the Charleston Museum, contrasting it with his experience in Philadelphia when he was denied access to a museum because of racism.¹² In another instance during the antebellum, period, although possibly not at the precise moment of Jones Jr.’s visit to the Charleston Museum, there was an exhibit that entailed a stuffed zebra with “a Negro Boy riding on his back.”¹³ Examples such as this encouraged the objectification of people from Africa. A century later, the Charleston Museum had rice-husking demonstrations conducted by local African Americans dressed in traditional slaveera attire.¹⁴ Black people put on display within old Charleston by the white majority further complicated tourism for African-American travelers by making them feel uncomfortable. This was, of course, in addition to the trials and tribulations that existed for African Americans traveling to and from Charleston. From this, we can surmise anecdotally that some financially successful free Black people in the United States in the nineteenth century were interested in tourism and traveled domestically, but to do so was also very risky to their personal welfare.

As can be seen from the Jones Hotel eyewitness accounts, European Americans and Europeans were frequent customers. However, for African-American people, even those with wealth, travel to continental Europe was difficult before 1865 because the State Department would not issue passports for them, even when they were free. Passports were not needed for entry to the British Empire, including Canada, which was significant for those seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad.¹⁵ However, while traveling domestically, finding places to stay, places to eat, and leisure activities was often challenging not only because of race-based discrimination. An example of this is documented in 1869, when, “Robert Stevens, negro of Charleston, South Carolina [sued] against the Richmond and Fredericksburg Railroad, for putting his wife [May] in a second-class car by force after selling her a first-class ticket … the Judge [John C. Underwood], in his charge to the Jury, which was half black, said distinction on account of color was a relic of barbarism…. The jury brought a verdict of $1,600 [about $38,800, today] damages for the plaintiffs.”¹⁶ This case underscores the systemic racism African Americans faced, even when they had legally purchased the same services as white individuals. After Reconstruction and the Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537, 1896) case, it would be decades before the juries in much of the United States comprised fifty percent African Americans. If Judge John C. Page 39 →Underwood (1809–1873) had not been an abolitionist, the court ruling that upheld “separate but equal” treatment could not have been dated much earlier and called “Robert Stevens v. Richmond, Fredericksburg, and the Potomac Railroad,” because of this travel by railroad incident that originated from Charleston. The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upheld as legal not only Jim Crow segregation but also, as I discuss later, the objectification of people from Africa.¹⁷

Victor H. Green published the Green Book between 1936 and 1966 (although it was suspended from 1942 to 1945 because of World War II) in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Green wanted to provide useful information for African Americans who were considering travel throughout the United States, where racially segregated businesses posed a great potential for “running into difficulties, embarrassments.”¹⁸ On the eve of the Green Book’s debut, besides being discriminated against, African Americans in New South-Charleston were being objectified in ways that were offensive and that glorified the Old South aura of the city’s ambiance. For example, in Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories, Louis D. Rubin Jr., who was in his youth at this time, reflected on how “Black people Downtown were ‘colorful’ and ‘primitive’ and wore bandannas and spoke Gullah, and they went about the streets hawking fish and shrimp and produce, and everyone knew their picturesque vending cries. The women wore uniforms to work and had names like Viola and Evalina. Downtown was steeped in history…. [the] older Downtown homes had outbuildings behind them that had once been slave quarters. Downtown there was culture and art, and painters and etchers made illustrations.”¹⁹ Thus, it can be seen through Rubin’s youthful, white privileged eyes how African-American people played decorative roles in Charleston’s cultural landscape in a similar manner as the romanticized old buildings and Spanish-moss–covered trees that were being depicted in Charleston Renaissance art. Examples of the illustrations made by the painters and etchers that Rubin references can be seen in the contemporaneous Charleston Welcomes You: America’s Most Historic City travel brochure produced by the Chamber of Commerce in 1938. On the brochure’s cover is an old, balding, African-American man, holding his hat respectfully in hand while standing to the side of an open, black wrought-iron gate, welcoming the reader to the city.²⁰ Through the gate is a picturesque, manicured flower garden in the foreground with several of Charleston’s old and iconic buildings in the middle and background, including the steeples of the white elite churches, St. Michael’s and St. Philips, that lend to the municipality’s nickname, “the Holy City.” Within the brochure Page 40 →are additional pages depicting romanticized—and sanitized—photographs of Charleston historic buildings, old trees, and occasional African-American bodies as part of the attraction, portrayed in the acquiescent roles that Rubin articulated. Events such as Charleston’s Azalea Festival further reinforced African-American iconic roles in tourism, which attracted northern white vacationers.²¹ As Stephanie Yuhl has observed in her opus, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, “[b]y clinging to their memories and little else, Charleston’s white elites successfully situated their politicized notions of the past, present, and future at the center of city life,”²² and this dominated the African-American experience in Charleston in ways that were often adverse.

Accounts from early twentieth-century African-American visitors include varying opinions on Charleston’s touristic situation. Leila Pendleton, an African-American community activist and educator in Washington, DC, believed that places such as Fort Sumter and Charleston harbor were witnesses to nineteenth-century African-American struggles for freedom, which were important events that led to emancipation and to Robert Smalls’s courageous escape on a Confederate supply ship.²³ Confederate War monuments, such as John C. Calhoun’s, are reminders that white supremacy should not be forgotten. When Booker T. Washington and his entourage visited Charleston as part of the South Carolina State Negro Business League tour in 1909, they admired the city’s historic architecture and cultural traditions.²⁴ However, other early twentieth-century African-American visitors to Charleston were of a different opinion. W. E. B. DuBois commented that he was disgusted by the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow oppression that he observed during his visit in 1917, and others shared DuBois’s sentiments for decades to come and across racial lines.²⁵ As late as the 1970s, a New York Times travel reporter reflected, “how does a black man see that same history? … How does a tour of Charleston’s slave Market strike his soul? … Does he see the same ghosts I [i.e., a white man] do, or far more sinister ones?”²⁶ In comparison, when looking more broadly at African American–produced travel literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century that was published for public consumption, the prevalence of destinations written about are in Europe, the Mediterranean, Mexico, and Central America. Although some ventured to African countries, such as to Liberia, as part of the American Colonization Society’s efforts, most African-American tourists in North America did not feel that their travels were worth writing about—or, at least, there was little to report in a positive light.²⁷

Page 41 →The African-American population in Charleston during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was far from trivial, hovering above fifty percent of the city’s total population. African-American people constituted from thirty-four to seventy-two percent of any given ward. Charleston’s neighborhoods were the least segregated compared with other southern cities, such as New Orleans, Richmond, Memphis, and Savannah. This resulted in there not being a concentrated African-American residential district nor a commercial main street. Therefore, African-American businesses in Charleston were scattered across the city and dependent on white patrons. However, the city’s economy and boosterism never diversified to incorporate African-American tourists from elsewhere as part of the municipality’s revenue generation agenda.²⁸

Charleston was among several southern American cities in the early twentieth century that sought to diversify their economies through heritage tourism. Others included New Orleans, St. Augustine, Natchez, and Williamsburg, although only New Orleans (also a large city) had substantial infrastructure listed in the Green Book to accommodate African-American travelers (more than fifty-eight businesses listed in 1946). These data contradict an earlier assumption on an inverse relationship between the number of listings for a given community and the racial demographics of the community in question because both Columbia, SC, and New Orleans appear to be more alike in their Green Book listing depth.²⁹ However, in reflection on other Southern historic cities that boostered heritage as part of their respective economic stimulus agenda during this period, another correlation emerges. Within the 1946 Green Book, St. Augustine had two establishments (both tourist homes), and Natchez and Williamsburg were not even listed.³⁰ Although they were smaller, St. Augustine, Natchez, and Williamsburg should have had far more listings by the logic of this former reasoning. Although African Americans worked at Colonial Williamsburg and St. Augustine’s resorts and were involved with the Natchez Pilgrimage festival, African-American tourists were not allowed to stay at any hotel in or near the respective historic districts.³¹ Historic Charleston was not centrally administrated like Williamsburg with the Rockefellers and the Flagers in St. Augustine, yet the situation for Black people had many similarities.

From 1865 to 1917, as well as from 1932 to 1952, Charleston lacked a hotel that would accommodate Black travelers. At least one of the tourist homes hosted out-of-town Black guests long before the creation of the Green Book, illustrating how the Green Book’s function was organizing already existing Page 42 →information. There may have been other tourist homes before the 1930s that have since been forgotten. For example, in 1888, Frederick Douglass stayed at 99 Coming Street (listed as A. Serrant’s tourist home in the Green Book) when he visited Charleston as part of a lecture tour across several southern states.³² His stay in Charleston inspired the local Black community and challenged his own views on American racial politics. In his later speech, “I Denounce the So-Called Emancipation as a Stupendous Fraud,” delivered on April 16, 1888, in Washington, DC, Douglass criticized the post–Emancipation Proclamation treatment of Black Americans. He argued from his personal observations while staying in South Carolina and Georgia that the proclamation, although legally freeing slaves, did not grant them true freedom or equality. Instead, it left them vulnerable to systemic racism, violence, and disenfranchisement.³³ The Coming Street location where Douglass stayed was near the center of Black culture in Charleston during the late nineteenth century, including the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Avery Normal Institute, which played crucial roles in the Black community’s spiritual, social, and intellectual life. Douglass’s stay at 99 Coming Street is historically significant, because it highlights the ongoing struggle for racial equality and the challenges faced by Blacks in post-Reconstruction.

The situation of racial discrimination of Black visitors is exemplified by how the city government and Chamber of Commerce discouraged the accommodation of African-American tourism too, similar to Williamsburg, Natchez, and St. Augustine. Most African-American visitors to Charleston during these decades came to visit friends or family, or for business, not for recreation.³⁴ Thus, the early twentieth-century Black visitors to Charleston for whom we have accounts, such as Washington, did not stay in a hotel but with family, friends or associates, or at a tourist home like the ones later listed in the Green Book. The attraction closest to Charleston for Black tourists during this time was the racially segregated Atlantic Beach, located one hundred ten miles northeast of the city near Myrtle Beach.³⁵ There was also a small campground near Walterboro, approximately fifty miles west of Charleston, that accommodated Black travelers.³⁶ Atlantic Beach and the Walterboro-area campground also show a Black preference for places that were an escape from present discrimination and historical reminders of it.

Other distinguished Black travelers, such as Washington and members of the South Carolina State Negro Business League, reserved an entire railcar to avoid public displays of Jim Crow humiliation that would force them to Page 43 →yield their seats to other white passengers. In Charleston, it was customary for the Black elite to acquire the largest houses that they could afford to both show off their wealth and host distinguished guests, which came with additional social prestige. Large Black-owned homes would also host parties, weddings, meetings, and other gatherings that whites otherwise hosted at hotels because there were no other venues.³⁷ This situation also reinforced a sense of community belonging among Black Charlestonians.

Traveling to and around a destination, whether by train or automobile, presented unique challenges for Black citizens in the Jim Crow era. Candacy A. Taylor documents the experience of her stepfather, Ronald Burford, who, as a child, witnessed his father encounter a county sheriff checkpoint in Tennessee during the 1950s. During the incident, Burford’s father had to falsely tell the sheriff that his automobile belonged to his white employer and that the women and child were domestics he was chauffeuring for work, and not his car or his family, to keep the car from being stolen (or worse) by the sheriff out of jealousy. Well into the 1960s, African-American motorists often took with them ice coolers with food, spare cans of fuel, portable toilets, and bedding to use on their road trips because of the racism encountered during travel.³⁸ Another incidence of this in South Carolina from before the advent of the Green Book is found in the “Greenville County Sheriff Sales Books for Automobiles Seized While Transporting Contraband Liquors, 1925–1927.” In June 1925, Sheriff Samuel D. Willis confiscated a Cadillac Touring Car from a “Negro from Charlotte,” which was subsequently auctioned off to William Felix Mauldin for one hundred twenty-five dollars.³⁹ No other discussion is made about the identity of the “Negro from Charlotte” or what they were carrying, in comparison with the other entries within the Sales Book, where full names are given in addition to frequent mentions of the quantities of alcohol involved. Could this have been the process for a jealous sheriff to clear title on an automobile stolen from an African-American owner? During the 1920s, a new Cadillac Touring Car sold for more than three thousand dollars, a price normally out of reach for Mauldin, who was formerly employed at a textile mill. One hundred twenty-five dollars would also be an enviable, quick pay bump for a racist, underpaid sheriff in Greenville County. When he purchased the Cadillac for one hundred twenty-five dollars, Mauldin had a new career as a driver for his own car service.⁴⁰ Thus, African-American motorists had to be careful about travel to and from their destinations in addition to the discriminatory challenges encountered where they went.

Page 44 →During World War I, the Hametic Hotel established and accepted Black customers before going out of business in 1932, four years before the publication of the first Green Book. The Great Depression adversely affected African Americans, so few could afford to stay at the Hametic Hotel (or reserve an entire railcar to avoid humiliating Jim Crow segregation). The Hametic Hotel was in the former Faber House (built in 1839), located at 635 East Bay Street, conveniently a block away from Charleston Union Station (burned in 1947).⁴¹ This significant hotel had twenty-five bedrooms, a reception hall, dining room, parlor, and kitchen.⁴²

Between 1936 and 1966, the Green Book listed a total of ten locations in Charleston, with an additional non-location-specific entry for First Class taxi service. As mentioned before, five of these listings appeared in the 1946 case study year, which was about the average number listed in any given Green Book edition. When mapped across the Charleston peninsula, two very distinct correlations become readily apparent, especially when visualizing the Hametic Hotel as an associated site that went out of business on the eve of the Green Book’s debut:

1. Charleston’s Green Book’s listings are located far from the touristic historic district as it existed between 1931 and 1966; and
2. Charleston’s Green Book’s listings are predominantly located in a corridor spanning the width of the city’s midpeninsula, with the older listings skewed toward Charleston Union Station in the east and the more recent listings located near the Ashley River Bridge (for US Highway 17) in the west, reflecting the national and local shift in travel mode from rail to automobile.

These findings reflect Derek Alderman’s, Ethan Bottone’s, and Joshua Inwood’s significant observations regarding the places listed in the Green Book, highlighting their role as African-American counterpublic spaces. These locations were not just safe havens for African-American travelers during the era of segregation but also vibrant, dynamic places that reflected the evolving needs and aspirations of the African-American community. The data from different editions of the Green Book reveal how these spaces changed over time, adapting to new social, economic, and political realities. This dynamism is evident in the shifting listings and the emergence of new businesses and services, illustrating the resilience and resourcefulness of the African-American community in creating and maintaining these vital spaces.⁴³

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Closer inspection of the survey reveals that the Hametic and James Hotels served as bookends to this corridor, with the Hametic Hotel greeting African Americans who came by rail and the James Hotel accommodating those traveling by automobile. Tourist homes are very common throughout the Green Book. They were frequently women-operated businesses that enabled host families to have an additional income, such as those operated by Elizabeth Alston, Annie Mayes, Huldah L. Harleston, and Annabell Serrant. Some of the restaurants were also joint spousal and extended family operations, like Queen’s Restaurant and Scott’s Restaurant. Several of the people who operated Green Book businesses worked at other Charleston hospitality-or food-related establishments, further exhibiting a transference or application of skill, knowledge, and economic necessity of more than one income.

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On the eastern side of the peninsula is also the Cooper River Bridge, specifically listed in the 1941 edition of the Green Book, seeming to indicate that African-American motorists could travel on it. Unlike the Ashley River Bridge, which was free to cross, the Cooper River Bridge charged a toll until 1946.⁴⁴ The Avery Normal Institute (125 Bull Street), a school for Black students, was listed once in the Green Book for 1947.⁴⁵ Although historian John N. Ingham observes that Charleston did not have an exclusive African-American commercial area, there does appear to be a specific corridor that served African-American visitors through those listed in the Green Book, implying that African-American businesses in other parts of the city focused on either local clientele of both races and/or white tourists. Page 47 →African-American business included the informal economy of the street hawkers observed by Rubin, who plied their trade within the touristic historic district while playing the objectified roles that white civil authorities and tourists expected of them. As late as 1954, only one question on the city’s sixty-question tour guide licensing program was devoted to African-Americans in Charleston and that was the identification of the Avery Normal Institute for Black students.⁴⁶

In Overground Railroad, Taylor states that based on her personal experience visiting approximately five thousand Green Book sites, fewer than twenty-five percent remain.⁴⁷ Within Charleston, seven of ten remain, which is an exceptionally high survival rate considering Taylor’s statistics, although none of the original businesses are still in operation. Before publication of this article, little has been investigated by scholars on the Green Book sites of Charleston comprehensively. Although some of the buildings fall within Charleston’s historic district today, this is due to relatively recent expansions of the district. None of the former Green Book listed buildings are specifically recognized for this past either. In 1985, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History historic property survey inventoried 15 Nassau Street but did not identify it as historically exceptional.⁴⁸ In response to the 2018 motion picture, Green Book, Hanna Raskin wrote an article for the Post and Courier titled “Before ‘Green Book’ Was a Movie, Charleston Restaurants Were in the Guidebook.”⁴⁹ Nic Butler at the Charleston County Public Library also wrote a website article titled “The Green Book for Charleston, 1938–1966”⁵⁰ in February 2019; however, the film features none of Charleston’s sites. Raskin and Butler did important first explorations of Charleston’s Green Book sites that serve as the foundation for this article. Butler also addresses businesses such as the City Taxi Company and the Waverly tourist home, which are incorrectly listed in the Green Book as being in Charleston, so they are not included in this study. Those businesses that did function in Charleston are the following, and they are organized in order of Green Book appearance.

In the map reproduced here, the Hametic Hotel is depicted with a sixpointed star and “0,” and the surviving Green Book sites are identified with five-pointed stars and numbered according to the brief descriptions that follow. Lost Green Book sites are identified by an “X” and their corresponding number. The approximate borders of Charleston’s Old and Historic District, as it existed between 1931 and 1966, are also identified on the map with a thick line boundary. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Map is from the Library of Congress. All other additions and edits to the map are by the author.

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0. Hametic Hotel, 635 East Bay Street, which operated from ca. 1917 to 1932, closed shortly before the Green Book debuted, and is provided as a geographic reference in relation to the railroad and other Green Book–listed locations.⁵¹

1. Mrs. Alston, 43 South Street (tourist home), was among the first cohort of businesses in Charleston listed in the Green Book, spanning from 1938 to 1946. This establishment was run by Elizabeth Alston with her husband, Isaac Alston.⁵²
2. Mrs. Gadsden, 15 Nassau Street (tourist home), was among the first cohort of businesses in Charleston listed in the Green Book, spanning from 1938 to 1967. The property’s name is attributed to the original owner, Mrs. Gadsden.⁵³
3. Page 49 →Annie Mayes, 82½ Spring Street (tourist home), was among the first cohort of businesses in Charleston listed in the Green Book, spanning from 1938 to 1967. Mayes, who is also identified as a laundress, hosted intermittent travelers.⁵⁴
4. Huldah L. Harleston’s, 250 Ashley Avenue (tourist home and tavern), was among the first cohort of businesses in Charleston listed in the Green Book, spanning from 1938 to 1950. Harleston, who was widowed with children, sold prepared foods from the house and hosted intermittent travelers.⁵⁵
5. Green Grill, 186 Spring Street, was in the Green Book from 1939 to 1941. Susan Green, a professional cook, likely sold prepared foods from the house. The building was demolished during the 1960s as part of the urban renewal “Crosstown Expressway” development, now called the Septima P. Clark Parkway, after the civil rights activist.⁵⁶
6. A. Serrant, 99 Coming Street (tourist home), was in the Green Book from 1941 to 1952. Annabell Serrant, who passed in 1943, was married to Gabriel Serrant, a Haitian immigrant and waiter at the Fountain Inn.⁵⁷ This property was acquired by the College of Charleston in 1976 and demolished sometime after, where now stands the School of Math & Science Building.
7. James Hotel, 238 Spring Street, built in 1951, was in the Green Book from 1952 to 1967. It was the only “colored” hotel listed in the Charleston city directory along with an attached restaurant. The hotel was operated by Edward and James Washington near the Ashley River Bridge. Distinguished hotel guests included Hank Aaron, Count Basie, James Brown, Fats Domino, and Duke Ellington.⁵⁸ The building was demolished in the 1960s as part of the urban renewal “Crosstown Expressway” development.
8. Brooks Restaurant, 58 Morris Street, was in the Green Book from 1959 to 1961. It started as a small café that opened in 1934 and expanded into a larger restaurant in 1950. The business relocated in 1967 and closed in 1979. The Brooks Café and Restaurant was a family-operated business, including Henry, Albert, and Benjamin Brooks. A Brooks Motel was also opened after 1963, but the Brooks had ceased advertising in the Green Book two years earlier. The Brooks Restaurant also hosted political meetings, including those involved with the civil rights movement.⁵⁹
9. Queen’s Restaurant, 55 Kennedy Street, was in the Green Book from 1959 to 1961, operated by Queen and George Breach.⁶⁰
10. Scott’s Restaurant, 237 Fishburne Street, was in the Green Book from 1959 to 1961, operated by Beatrice and William Mack. William also worked at Bullwinkel’s, a local bakery.⁶¹

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The occurrence of the Green Book happened amid Jim Crow segregation. As previously mentioned, before the Green Book the Hametic Hotel welcomed Black customers from 1917 to 1932. After the Green Book ceased in 1966, segregated accommodations for African-American travelers were still needed. For example, the J&P Motel and Café (also called the Esau Jenkins Shop and Hotel) was established, testifying to the continuing endemic racism in Charleston and the need for accommodations for African Americans after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁶² As Clement observed, the continued neglect of white Charlestonian interest in African-American tourists was highly present in 1977. Not until the mid-1980s were the first official African-American history tours, a guidebook, and the Moja Arts Festival that celebrates African-American and Caribbean cultures organized in Charleston. Also, it was in the 1990s that Charleston tourism specifically advertised to an African-American audience.⁶³ These efforts resulted in the identification and preservation of African-American-associated historic sites in the Charleston area, most significantly the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, established in 2006. These are great improvements, but they fall far short of addressing past wrongs.

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On February 11, 1945, the historian E. Horace Fitchett of the historically Black Claflin College presented an address to the Charleston Interracial Committee, calling for (among many other things) the “equal accommodations for Negroes as provided under the law, be actually provided on all public transportation facilities, and that discriminatory practices now common in travel be abolished.”⁶⁴ Visiting from Orangeburg, SC, Fitchett undoubtedly stayed at one of the tourist houses mentioned in the 1941 and 1946 editions of the Green Book (they are the same) or with other friends/family he knew. Two decades passed before the Civil Rights Act required Fitchett’s Page 52 →comment to come into law, which was the premise for the end of the publication of the Green Book in 1966. However, many more years of begrudged integration had to pass before the hearts and minds of the public made a substantial enough shift for some change within the city and the country.

Jennifer B. Hawes, a reporter for the Post and Courier, describes the African-American past in Charleston at the moment of the city’s 350th anniversary in 2020 as a “Forsaken history.” She observes that many “key places in Charleston’s racial past [are] long neglected.”⁶⁵ Hawes covers multiple places, including sites that need to be revisited for their historic significance, such as Colonel William Rhett’s wharf (where the first imported Africans were sold at auction in 1696) and William Payne’s auction house (where hundreds of enslaved people were also auctioned), but also those that have been forgotten, such as the African Church, the Work House next to the City Jail, John Mood’s silversmith shop (where slave badges were made), and the James Hotel. Indeed, the James Hotel is the only property from the twentieth century that was discussed by Hawes as a very significant site from Charleston’s African-American past, although—and unfortunately—it is no longer extant (the site is currently a parking lot for a fast-food establishment after the “Crosstown Expressway” development). The James Hotel was a site of African-American agency, whereas many of the other sites discussed by Hawes were places of oppression.

Although the James Hotel, along with two other Green Book sites, are gone, there are seven other formerly listed locations that survive, which is a much higher percentage than in many other cities. This study has found that none of the seven surviving sites have any indication that they were once listed in the Green Book (no placard, official historical designation, etc.). The Hametic Hotel, which predates the Green Book, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and its association as a hotel that serves African-American customers is part of its official history, but it is called the Faber House after its original nineteenth-century, single-family, white occupant. Although this building was a recipient of the Preservation Society’s Carolopolois Award in 1972 for exemplary restoration work, this site lacks an interpretative marker about the historical significance of this place, whether as the Hametic Hotel or the Faber family’s home. Currently, these seven Green Book sites exhibit a high level of integrity and form a coherent heritage corridor across the midsection of Charleston’s peninsula, serving as a landmark counternarrative to the establishment and administration of the city’s original Old and Historic District as it existed between 1931 and 1966. More could be developed on the interpretation and public history of the seven Green Book historic buildings Page 53 →to improve public awareness and how it responded to the racism that plagued the Old and Historic District during these decades.

Future steps taken must involve the participation of African Americans—inclusive of those from elsewhere who traveled to Charleston as well as those who lived in Charleston—especially considering that the authors Hawes, Raskin, and Butler, who have published on some of these historic places, are not African American. African-American voices are needed to define why Charleston’s Green Book historic buildings matter. This is where the community and preservation organizations working in Charleston and elsewhere in South Carolina could create partnerships with government and community leaders to mark and interpret these historic sites that can serve as a continuing guide in our evolving understanding of the intersection of race, travel, and power in the United States.

Barry L. Stiefel is a professor at the College of Charleston’s historic preservation and community planning program, which is part of the Department of Art and Architectural History. He is interested in how local preservation efforts affect regional, national, and multinational policies in cultural resource management and natural heritage conservation. He has completed numerous publications, including ones that address sustainability in heritage preservation; cultural–ethnic architectural history; historic transportation mobility; human-centered historic preservation; community building through historic places; diversity, equity, and inclusion in historic preservation; and preservation education.