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#TheRootTrip: In Atlanta, a Mystery. Who Was Ma Sutton?
In the short time that I have to research these Green Book spots, the hardest ones tend to be those that were owned by black women. Even when they’re called “famous” or dubbed as “must visits” in historical documents, the details about the lives of these female entrepreneurs are often either lost or hard to…
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#TheRootTrip: Ga. on My Mind
Another night on the road, another black-owned hotel stay. This time it was the Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta North/Alpharetta in Alpharetta, Ga., right outside of Atlanta. And yet again, the property is owned by the Capstone Development Group. But Atlanta has a few black-owned hotel options, including properties owned by Robert Johnson (founder and former…
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#TheRootTrip: Chillin’ in Style in Birmingham, Ala.
More chillin’ at a black-owned hotel! This one is the Residence Inn by Marriott Birmingham Downtown at the University of Alabama-Birmingham at 821 20th St. South, and it’s another property held by the black-owned Capstone Development Investment Group. Back in 2013, the group purchased this seven-story, 129-room hotel for $20 million in cash. You’ve gotta…
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#TheRootTrip: Success … and Then … Sadness
As I’ve noted over and over, I don’t know what I’ll find when I go to a Green Book location. Thousands of miles, a few dozen sites, and most are either empty or shells of what they used to be. So when I put 1705 4th Avenue North, Birmingham, Ala., into my GPS for the…
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#TheRootTrip: Martin Luther King Jr. Slept Here
The A.G. Gaston Motel is an important landmark in the civil rights movement and was designated by President Barack Obama as the center of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. Located just a block away from the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site where four black girls lost their lives in 1963 when the Ku…
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#TheRootTrip: A Grand Hotel in the Heart of Meridian, Miss.
#TheRootTrip is a series of long, two- to three-hour drives on the highway as I desperately try to get to small towns before sundown. The trip from Jackson, Miss., to Meridian, Miss., happened in the late afternoon, and I could see a thunderstorm approaching as I tried hard to reach my destination before dark. What’s…
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#TheRootTrip: The Green Acres Motel Was the Place to Be
As in most cities during the 1950s, white flight was in full flower in Dallas as discriminatory redlining by banks and Realtors worked to create middle-class suburbs and economically deprived inner cities. According to The City in Texas: A History, builders built more than 30,000 new homes in Dallas, but fewer than 1,000 for blacks. In…
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#TheRootTrip: In Irving, Texas, There’s a Black-Owned Franchise Hotel Hidden in Plain Sight
Until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, most hotels and motels actively discriminated against blacks. And hotel and motel ownership was a rare instance unless the building was completely built by the African-American hotel owner from the ground up (more on that later). The idea that blacks would own a corporate hotel franchise…
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#TheRootTrip: An Abandoned Grocery Now Stands Where a Tourist Home Once Stood in El Paso, Texas
Just a 10-minute jog to the Mexican border sits what was listed in the 1957 Negro Travelers’ Green Book as the A. Winston Tourist Home at 3205 Alameda Ave., El Paso, Texas, which was owned by Anderson and Gertrude Winston. The Winstons lived in El Paso for most of their lives, with Anderson being trained as…
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#TheRootTrip: A Food (and Family) Connection in Phoenix
I asked folks, “Which black businesses should I check out in Phoenix?” and universally people said, “Lo-Lo’s Chicken and Waffles.” I agreed. But what they didn’t know is that the owner of Lo-Lo’s is my cousin Larry White. Here’s the quick-and-dirty black-family story of how we’re cousins: Larry’s mother, Elizabeth White, is my Aunt Bethy,…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
