Mapping the Green Book
Architectural historian Catherine W. Zipf
Episode 2.
Our guest is architectural historian Catherine W. Zipf, and we are talking about The Green Book.
The Green Book was a travel guide for African Americans published from 1938 to 1967. It was created by Victor Hugo Green, a postal worker from New York, who wanted to help Black travelers during segregation in the United States.
The guide listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that welcomed black travelers during this period of segregation.
Catherine is one of three people spearheading a project called The Architecture of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book, which references the full title of the Green Books. This is an architectural history project that aims to record and study these important historical sites.
Helped by volunteer researchers, the team is building a database that intends to list every building documented in the Green Books.
We discover that few original copies of the Green Books have survived. We learn about the mundane buildings, listed in the books, that provided a lifeline to Black travelers and what it takes to record them all in a database.
In our interview, Catherine mentions that 50,000 sites were recorded in the Green Books. She asked that we point out the figure is actually between 15,000 and 20,000, and that about half of the US states are represented in the project’s database.
A collection of digitized copies of the Green Books can be seen in the New York Public Library’s website.
Several books are mentioned in this episode, including:
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor. (Abrams Press, 2020)
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo