negro motorist green book

Willie Wardell owns the Mighty Midget Mart Shell gas station, located at 4936 Albemarle Road in Charlotte, N.C., and he’s been in the convenience store business for the past 40 years. His store has everything that other gas stations in the neighborhood have, and he makes sure to price things competitively. But when I started…

I wanna make this clear: Iwi Fresh Garden Day Spa at 341 Nelson St. SW in Atlanta is one of the best black-owned businesses I’ve ever visited. Point blank. What makes it the best? A number of things. Owner Yolanda Owens is a cool and beautiful sister (Alpha Kappa Alpha member, by the way) who’s…

Yeah, so lemme tell you about my trip to Greenville, S.C. My task was to find the Dr. Gibbs Tourist Home, located at 914 Anderson Road, and I was excited because I thought that if this person was a doctor, I was pretty sure that he or she would have a pretty impressive home that…

In the 1957 Negro Motorist Green Book, the Connally Tourist Home is located just a block away from Morris Brown College in Atlanta and is a multistory home that was common in the late 19th century. But I was interested in it because it was the first tourist home on this trip that I could…

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 Even when they’re called “famous” or dubbed as “must visits” in historical documents, the details about the lives of these female entrepreneurs are often either lost or hard to…

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…

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…

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…