lawrence ross
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#TheRootTrip: A Police Station May Have Replaced the Hotel Jim, but Not the Legacy of the Black Owner
You can’t expect to find every address from the 1957 Negro Travelers’ Green Book intact. Sixty years’ worth of city renewal, knocking down buildings for other buildings and then knocking down those buildings a few decades later, can transform a block. As such, the building at 413 Fifth St. in Fort Worth, Texas, isn’t the…
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#TheRootTrip: Not Much to See at the Evans Tourist Home … Unless You Surprise a Neighbor
This is the Evans Tourist Home in Fort Worth, Texas, listed in the 1957 Negro Travelers’ Green Book. I wasn’t able to find out much about the person who lived here, and honestly, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about this house. It’s just a regular house, now turned into a duplex, in a historic black district…
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#TheRootTrip: Dallas Cowboys Fans Will Find a Room With the Perfect View at This Motel
Whooo!! I’d never been to 99 percent of the Green Book neighborhoods prior to this trip, but I knew where 1839 Fort Worth Ave. was. It was just off Hampton Road, where all of my Dallas relatives live (and, though I can’t prove it, where I believe all 300,000 black folks in Dallas live ……
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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,…
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#TheRootTrip: A Ghost of the Green Book in Phoenix
The dilapidated neighborhood sits in the dark shadow of downtown Phoenix, an American shantytown that time forgot. It’s a block with boarded-up, lean-to homes with glass windows that have been replaced by Home Depot plastic sheeting. Lingering are beaten-up F-150 trucks with giant American flags as their only point of pride, and desperate shirtless men…
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#TheRootTrip: The Blackest Voyage Begins at L.A.’s Only Black-Owned Gas Station
Dawn hadn’t broken at 5 a.m. PDT when I jumped into the Mustang and headed east. #TheRootTrip is officially underway, and the first destination was Hooper’s Shell at 11913 Compton Ave., Los Angeles. Hooper’s is the only black-owned gas station in Los Angeles, so of course it made sense to fill up the Mustang for…