green book

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…

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…

#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…

You can’t visit Jackson, Miss., a surprisingly progressive city in a very conservative state, without checking out the Big Apple Inn Restaurant on 509 N. Farish St. A delightful hole in the wall that reeks of old, black Mississippi, the Big Apple Inn has become a darling of television shows looking for authentic, unfiltered, black…

It was onward to Jackson, Miss., and my first Green Book stop was at the former Shepherds Kitchenette at 604 North Farish St. During Jim Crow segregation, Farish Street was the center of the black business community, home to numerous record companies and restaurants, and it was the original home of Jackson State University. David…

I know these black men. I’ve known them all of my life. That was my first thought after I’d walked down the darkened hallway, past Stamper’s barbershop in Monroe, La., and into the pool hall where a dozen black men—ranging in age from mid-30s to “he been here forever”—sat around enjoying each other’s presence. Bones…

Nothing against Starbucks because Lord knows that over the years, I’ve spent a mortgage payment on venti iced chai lattes, but when I saw that Shreveport, La., had a black-owned coffee bar in its Red River District, well, I just had to make a stop and visit. Welcome to Bon Temps Coffee Bar, owned by…

The next spot on my 1957 Green Book list was the Will Steward Hotel. I wasn’t able to find anything about Will Steward himself, but there were a number of Will Stewards who lived in the Shreveport area in the mid-1950s, although none of them seems directly connected to the building above. Now apartments, the…

As I rolled into Shreveport, La., my first Green Book location was simply noted in the guidebook as the intersection of Pierre and Looney, where the Grand Terrace Restaurant once stood. Remember, as part of #TheRootTrip, I’m not preselecting these locations, so what I find is what I find, and I do my research after…