While we generally opine on the kind of news that makes headlines, sometimes we stumble across an interesting tidbit of information that might not make the news but is still worth talking about. Today, that tidbit happens to be that Morgantown has three standing Green Book sites, which we discovered on a Preservation Alliance of West Virginia blog post.
If you immediately thought of the movie, you’re on the right track but not quite there. The 2018 film was named for The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for Black Americans from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s that listed places — restaurants, hotels, nightclubs and tourist houses — that were safe for Black travelers. The guidebook was created by Victor Hugo Green, a Black postal worker in Harlem, first published in 1936. The earliest editions focused on New York, but then expanded to cover the continental U.S. and eventually international cities. Green retired from the USPS to become the full time editor and publisher of the Green Book.
A handful of editions of the Green Book can be found by searching online. The Smithsonian has a 1941 copy that can be viewed, while the University of Michigan has a 1949 edition available as a pdf. The earlier version lists Beckley, Bluefield, Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, Welch, Wheeling and White Sulphur Springs. By 1949, Clarksburg, Fairmont, Grafton, Montgomery and Morgantown had been added.
The blog post, written by Dr. Katie Thompson, details three homes still standing that once served as tourist houses, or private homes that allowed Black travelers to stay there. A fourth one, listed in the 1949 Green Book on White Avenue, may or may not still exist. Thompson was specifically searching for Green Book sites in north-central West Virginia for a Historic Property Inventory (HPI) when she identified the three houses — two on Cayton Street and one on College Avenue — and then discovered they were all owned by members of the same family.
Thompson’s inclusion of the three homes doesn’t automatically put them on the Historic Register, and they still remain private residences, though perhaps someday they will be preserved and their place in history commemorated. But this discovery of still-standing Green Book sites in Morgantown creates an opportunity for discussion and education.
We think of Morgantown as a liberal, progressive place. But not all that long ago, there was one restaurant, one nightclub and four tourist houses — no hotels — that were considered safe for Black travelers in Morgantown. We think of Jim Crow and sundown towns — places where Black people were not allowed to be within city limits after dark — as misguided and antiquated practices belonging to a bygone era, but people born the last year the Green Book was published, 1966, are only in their mid-50s now.
The Green Book is a piece of history we’ve mostly forgotten, but it’s a piece of history that existed — and continues to exist — in little towns and big cities across America, including here, in our own backyard. We, as a nation, are having a discussion about race and racism now, and the necessity of something like the Green Book, which was published for almost 30 years, needs to be part of that conversation.
