Detroit Businesses in the Negro Motorist Green Book

"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 listed.   

 Many of the business are located 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. Latitude/longitude coordinates of each address were derived using Google Maps. The resulting spreadsheet of business locations was populated with information about the former use of the space and the current land use.

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 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.