In 1955, African Americans traveling through Toledo could find a room to lie down and rest at the Collingwood Motel on the corner of Collingwood Boulevard and Indiana Avenue.

They would be welcomed into Cook’s Tourist Home, a 22-room, three-story tourist home at 1736 Washington St., by proprietor Okreatta Cook.

They knew they wouldn’t be turned away if they stopped at the G. Davis Tourist Home at 532 Woodlawn Ave.

It was a small printed publication, The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, that was guiding these travelers through states still rife with racism and segregation.

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“The Green Book listed the places [in each state] that were safe harbors for African Americans,” said Alvin Hall, a financial educator, journalist, and the co-producer of the 2016 BBC Radio Podcast, The Green Book. “The guest houses where you could stay, where you could buy gasoline, where you could buy medicine if you needed it, get your hair done, restaurants where you could eat. Places that would serve African Americans without any hassles.”

Several of Calm’s photographs documenting the trip and the Green Book sites the men encountered are part of the Toledo Museum of Art exhibition Life Is a Highway: Art and American Car Culture, which closes Sept. 15.Hall and visual artist and photographer Jonathan Calm, will come to Toledo on Thursday to share the stories they documented on a road trip from Tallahassee, Fla., to Ferguson, Missouri. Their 2016 BBC Radio 4 documentary was inspired by the Green Book, a publication created by black postal carrier Victor Hugo Green, and distributed from 1936 through 1967.

On Thursday, Hall said the pair will share many of the stories they heard on their trip through images, recorded interviews, video and essays.

“We will talk through about how people survived during that time, the resilience of people, the interconnectness of people, and how the Green Book sought to make life better for people on the road,” he said.

A TROUBLED PAST

Racial tension during the mid-20th Century was random. Black Americans didn’t know sometimes what they were going to encounter while traveling, Hall said.

“We heard innumerable stories about stopping at the wrong gas stations to buy gas and that people think you can just drive up and get gas, but no,” Hall said. “If there were white people there, you had to wait until all the white people got served and then the service station owner might pull out a gun if you tried to drive away and would say ‘Where are you going? You just sit right here until I tell you I’m ready to put gas in your car.’”

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One of the women Hall interviewed told him this story: She was in the family car with her parents and sister, traveling from Chicago to Alabama to visit relatives, when her father sees a police car creeping up behind them.

“He makes the decision, I’m not stopping, because this isn’t going to end well, just based on a gut feeling from seeing the officer’s face,” Hall said. The family sped up, and pulled behind a church.

“They cut off the engine and they sit there and sit there, as the policeman goes up and down the road, back and forth, looking for them. And they had to sit there until midnight until they were able to leave,” Hall said. “She has never forgotten that. And that was typical because you could be stopped for anything. Not a road violation, just because you were an African-American family, driving a nice car in the south, that was considered to be an affront to Jim Crow.”

The TMA exhibition has several Green Book editions on display: copies from 1941, 1957, 1949, and 1955 lent from various libraries.

In New York, where Green started the Green Book before it spread to other communities and eventually went international, the public library houses copies of the guide in its digital collection.

“You can’t overstate its importance and the role the Green Book played,” said Robert Smith, director of the African American Legacy Project in Toledo, who says his perspective comes from “a child of people who traveled and who tried not to make too many stops.”

“I experienced it from the eyes of a very young black child,” the 72-year-old said, remembering  that his family packed enough food when they traveled to drive straight through if necessary.

It’s a memory that Toledo resident Norman Bell, Sr. also recalls vividly. Discrimination, he said, was pervasive, and segregation was “the policy, the law of the land.”

Bell came to Toledo in April 1957 and settled here, enticed by a cousin who called it “the free North.” When he took his young family from Northwest Ohio back to his roots in Baton Rouge, La., to visit family every year in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he never knew quite what they would experience on the 16-hour road trip.

“I would drive until I was exhausted and would stop at a service station and I would ask the owner if I could park my car on the owner’s lot,” he said. 

Bell said he is thankful he never experienced animosity from others. But despite taking precautions and experiencing fear of the unexpected on the highway, the promise of safe refuge provided by the Green Book never reached Bell. It was just a year ago that the 86-year-old learned about the Green Book through the Oscar-winning 2018 major motion film of the same name.

“I could relate to traveling in the south and going through what I’ve experienced; sleeping in my car and not getting a hotel where I would have a place to sleep and be comfortable,” Bell said. “I didn’t want to get off on those side roads, but had I known exactly where to go and who I would have been able to communicate with and that I would have been safe, then yes, I would have used it.”

A PART OF HISTORY LOST

The Green Book, a fact-based film, tells the story of a white bouncer [played by Viggo Mortensen] hired to serve as driver and bodyguard to black pianist Don Shirley [Mahershala Ali], and the intolerance they experienced in the segregated South in the ‘60s.

When Alvin Hall was invited to attend an Academy Awards screening of the film, he took particular interest in the answer to a question asked of the actors and producers of the film.

“The moderator asked all of them ‘Have you heard of the Green Book before the movie,’ and the answer was no,’” Hall said. “It’s a part of American history that people don’t think about.”

Local historian Tedd Long’s research in Toledo came up short as well.

“I think it’s like everything else, people don’t want to remember those things because it’s shameful for the rest of us to think about how the African Americans lived,” he said. “These are stories that disappeared and people want to sweep them under the rug and forget about them.”

The Green Book evolved and grew as a consequence of the Great Migration of the early and mid-20th century, when African Americans fled the racially fraught South for jobs and a new life in the North. Green wanted to give travelers who frequently traveled back home to visit those family members who stayed behind a guide to help them avoid the obstacles that still existed, Hall said. Despite those racial injustices, Green appeared to be an optimist, Hall says.

“When you are traveling, please mention the Green Book, so as to let these people know just how you found out about their place of business,” Green writes in an introductory note.

Green was part of a black postal union in New York whose members would stay in guest houses with local residents during its annual conference.

“That was the way it worked back then. They would share information about ‘what were the local places you could stay in town?’ And that began the Green Book,” Hall said.

The publication expanded south, west across the Mississippi, and eventually was published internationally.

CONCENTRATED NEIGHBORHOODS

Today, many of the businesses listed in the Green Book are gone, destroyed by urban renewal.

In their stead are abandoned lots. New business complexes filled with updated restaurants and quaint boutiques. Residential neighborhoods and acreage dotted with newer family homes.

Hall and Calm’s travels took them through neighborhoods in Birmingham, Ala. They traveled through Montgomery and saw the dilapidated Ben Moore Hotel, which was the first hotel to serve the city’s black citizens. They made stops in Memphis, the location of the former Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and wrapped up in Ferguson, originally designated as a “sundown town” a term used when signs were posted stating that blacks and other people of color had to leave the town by sunset.

“In almost every town we found either the location where a hotel was or where a restaurant was, or where the shell of a building remained,” Hall said. “Many people think these places are far from downtown; they’re not. Most of them were right next to the white downtown area. Literally it was a block or two that separated them. They were not as remote as many people thought.”

Many of the Toledo area businesses listed in the Green Book over the years were concentrated in neighborhoods where blacks moved during the migration.

In a story map on argis.com, an anonymous author maps out the differences in a trip from Detroit to Greensboro in the ‘60s and today, mentioning they were able to fix a flat tire at an auto shop on Pinewood Avenue in Toledo, that is now a residential neighborhood.

According to a study of concentrated residences in Toledo by Lee Williams, many African Americans first concentrated near the Warehouse District during the Civil War era and then the Stickney Avenue area.

“Just like other ethnic groups who migrated here, African Americans stayed together and supported each other. It was a way to preserve their cultural identity and protect themselves from the hostile environment they were entering,” Long said.

By the end of the 1920s, many lived in what was known as the Pinewood Avenue District, an area bounded by Washington, Erie, Dorr, and Ewing streets, that was also home to many of the Green Book listings.

Cook’s Tourist Home, where Okreatta Cook greeted weary travelers all those years ago and continued to be a place for boarders after the Green Book ceased to exist, was purchased by the city of Toledo and demolished in 2007.

“There will be a day sometime in the near future where this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States,” Green wrote in 1951. “It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication, for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”

First Published August 31, 2019, 10:00 a.m.