FInally, I am ready to sit down and finalize my paper. Throughout the summer, I kept a notebook (coincidentally, green similar to the travel guide) with my notes, citations, and personal reflections. I am glad that I kept such meticulous notes because it makes the final stage that much easier. I look forward to presenting my final project at the exhibition in September.

Outside of the knowledge I gained about the Green Book, I have also fine tuned my analytical and research skills. I walk away from this summer, not only with a thesis that I would like to continue to expand upon during the year but also research tools that will aid me in future projects. It has been a valuable learning experience between my independent travels, hours of database research, and recovering primary sources. I certainly enjoyed these past few weeks and as a result, I am reconsidering my future endeavors. I would like to include more research options whether I go to AMST grad school or law school.

July 21^st-August 6^th

After my trip to DC, I spent the next few days researching in Swem and trying to find articles that supported my ideas. At the time, I only had vague notions of what I was looking for. The wealth of information had almost become a burden and made the project more difficult rather than easier. However, one question kept coming up over and over again. “Why was the Green Book typically used by the middle class?” I wanted a better explanation than the recent growth in consumption of automobiles. I felt that this was only part of the answer. African Americans had been migrating from the South since the late 1800s and especially after WWI. Why did the Green Book and other guides become popular in the 1930s?

With these questions still swirling around in my head, I boarded the train heading to Greensboro, NC. I chose Greensboro for several reasons including its connections to the Civil Rights Movement (Woolworth Diner sit-ins), the International Civil Rights Museum located in downtown Greensboro, and finally this museum contains an authentic copy of the Green Book. These books are very rare to find and I could not pass up an opportunity to see an actual edition rather than continue to read through a pdf file.

I was not as successful in my endeavors to find the original addresses from the Green Book as I was in DC. The district that primarily consisted of African American businesses and homes had recently been reconstructed. A museum tour guide, an African American woman who grew up in Greensboro, explained to me that it was a part of urban renewal. Although, this part of my trip was a bust, my conversation with the tour guide was the key to forming my final thesis. We spoke about Greensboro, the sit-ins, and the Green Book. I explained my project and the roadblock that I had recently hit in regards to the middle class phenomenon. My tour guide had the answer. Prior to the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans did not travel as much. The automobile played a large part in the necessity for the travel guide, however the car was only half of the story. The other half was leisure and vacation. After WWI, more rising-middle class African Americans purchased automobiles and participated in leisure-travel, something that was previously unavailable to most of the black population. The travel guide became an asset as African Americans traveled to places other than their hometowns or homes of relatives and friends. The tour guide continued to explain that any travel done before WWI was primarily between towns and visiting family. This type of travel did not require a national guide because African Americans used “kin-networks” or word of mouth. They knew the safe locations either through recommendations or prior knowledge.

After this conversation, my project started to fall into place. I was excited to see my work finally take the form of a logical thesis. I wanted to focus on the African American middle class. How did the middle class use the travel guide? Was it a form of protest, a survival tactic, or both? With vacationing and travel, another response to Jim Crow laws was the establishment of black owned hotels and guest homes. How did these fit into the grand scheme of things? Before this summer, I did not expect my project to focus on the middle class. I wanted to collect oral history and look into the resistance and protest associated with the travel guide. Despite the twists and turns, I am completely thrilled with my project. I have connected the values of middle-class African Americans during the early 1900s (through articles, diaries, and primary sources), middle class purchasing power as a form of resistance and protest amongst middle-class African Americans, and the Green Book. These three parts function together similar to a flow chart: African American middle-class values encouraged the use of their purchasing power as a form of protest against Jim Crow laws while the Green Book assisted in exercising this purchasing power and thus the protest against discrimination and segregation in America.

Hello, I apologize for the delay in my blog entries. I prepared the entries throughout the weeks, however it was difficult to finalize and post during the course of my travels and research. As a result, this post will be a bit lengthier than others. However, I am excited to share with everyone the progress of my project as well as the twists and turns that it has taken over the past 7 weeks.

The idea for my Monroe Project began last fall when a professor showed me an article on The Green Book, a travel guide published for African American travelers during the Jim Crow era. I created the project around the idea that the guide acted as a marginalized artifact and I wanted to explore its significance. At the time, I hoped to show that a simple everyday object such as a travel guide played an important role in resistance and protest against the segregated system throughout the United States during the 20^th century. Other than that, I left my thesis open for what I would discover during my travels and research.

The first two weeks of my Monroe research consisted of reading primary documents and researching literature that either focused on or even hinted at the Jim Crow era, African American travel, The Green Book, and methods of protest and or resistance within a race context. This broad scope provided an immense amount of reading but I soon narrowed my focus to the obstacles that African Americans faced as travelers during the early 20^th century. During this time I also planned my trips to Washington DC and Greensboro, North Carolina. There, I would set out and locate the addresses listed in a 1949 edition of the Green Book. I also set up several interviews, however, those fell through and I had to alter the oral history part of my project. I hope to someday collect oral history that supports my project, however it was very difficult to track down those who used the travel guide in one summer. As a result, I shifted more of my attention to the primary documents and my personal travels for this project.

I came across several essays and books that I would recommend to those who are interested in race relations in the United States, the Civil Rights movement, or Africana studies. One such book is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson collected over 1200 interviews of African American who migrated from the South to other parts of the United States during the 1900s. From these interviews, Wilkerson created a book about this migration and its effects on the nation. Another source that has provided me with many essays on African American history is the American Quarterly, a journal that often comes up within the American Studies department.

After all of this reading and research, I was ready to embark on the second part of my project. It was time to gather some experience in the field. My first trip was to Washington D.C. At this point, I was still struggling with my thesis and what I wanted to specifically tackle with this paper. I did not know what to expect of this first adventure with the Green Book. I set out Tuesday morning at 8:30 with my notebook in hand that held a list of addresses found in the 1949 edition of the travel guide and the sheer hope that I would find something.

What were the chances of a restaurant, hotel, or business still operational since the publication of the 1949 edition? Slim to none. However, what I discovered in my travels was that the importance of my fieldwork was not discovering that a building remained through the change of the American landscape, but rather the emotions associated with looking for that one safe spot within an entire city. Basically, finding a needle in a haystack. What I understood after walking through the July heat in the concrete jungle of D.C. was the sheer luck a black traveler needed to find a safe spot within a racially divided city. One would either need a personal network that provided information or a travel guide, such as the Green Book, otherwise it would be better just to keep on driving. Then there was the overwhelming relief one feels when discovering that there is a place to eat, sleep, and breathe without the fear of physical, emotional, and psychological harm. The closest I came to feeling this was when I discovered the first business listed in the Green Book. I had found it. My project was not a bust. I had walked the entire alphabet of the DC city streets, but there it was on U Street. Maybe it was not a safe spot, since I could easily walk into any business and find relief in the air-conditioned buildings, but when one is a stranger to a city and alone, there is a sense of fear and tension associated with the new surroundings and not entirely shaken until one finds his or her destination.

The D.C. trip turned out to be a worthwhile venture. I discovered several buildings including a YMCA, YWCA, and a market, all of which were historically preserved as a part of the “U Street Heritage Trail”. This trail marks historically significant parts of D.C. that played large parts in either African American culture or the Civil Rights movement. Though the trip gave me several things to think, I was still hesitant to nail down my thesis. I could take on many different points including the necessity for such a guide, de facto segregation as exhibited in the close proximity of all the addresses listed under each city, or the guide as a representative symbol of a distinctive culture emerging as a part of the American landscape in the mid-1900s. As a result of this trip, I wanted to return to my primary documents and see what supported my findings in DC, especially de facto segregation and the rise of African American entrepreneurs as a result of segregation.

I consider this to be the first part of my research. The following weeks (I will publish in the next post) consisted of another trip and the creation of a more refined thesis. This thesis completely surprised me. I could not have predicted the direction that my project took after traveling to Greensboro. However, that is for another blog!