The controversial film Green Book just won an Oscar for Best Picture. If you’ve missed the film and all the media coverage, the story is about segregation during the Jim Crow Era as a black pianist and his white driver tour the South. The Green Book of the title was a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 by Victor Hugo Green with lists of lodgings and restaurants that would accommodate black travelers.
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Although its schools were not segregated, Utah had segregated lodgings and restaurants and worship, and Salt Lake City had segregated housing: realtors in many areas would not sell to black residents. In the best-known incident, the Hotel Utah prohibited singer Marian Anderson from staying in the hotel in the 1930s, but finally agreed to allow her to stay if she used the freight elevator and remained out of public areas.
Every black family in Utah has its stories of race-based discrimination. Frances Leggroan Fleming recalled, “When I used to go to Primary and religious class [at the local ward house], they’d say, ‘You can come in, but you can’t take part.’ So it was hard. It was hard growing up here. They talk about the South, but Salt Lake was no better. No better.”
The first Relief Society President of the Genesis Group, Lucile Perkins Bankhead, was the descendant of Mormon pioneers of 1847, 1848, and 1849 and faced her share of discrimination and racism. In 1939, she and other black women petitioned the Utah legislature against creating a black ghetto in the Salt Lake Valley.
Rubie Lugdol Nathaniel remembered, “Salt Lake City always had its segregation. We never had to ride in the rear of the bus . . . but you couldn’t sit wherever you wanted. You couldn’t go in dance halls, you couldn’t go in restaurants, and you couldn’t go to shows except in certain places.” (Stories from Ronald G. Coleman, “African-American Community,” in Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah (University of Utah Press, 2000).)
Here is a sample of the Utah businesses that advertised in the guide. These are from the 1940 (cover shown above), 1950, and 1960 editions.
A loose network of families and black churches also provided assistance to travelers. The two historic black churches in Utah are Calvary Baptist and Trinity A.M.E. The retired pastor of Calvary Baptist, Rev. France Davis, has done notable work on the history of the black churches of Utah. (Light in the Midst of Zion.)
After sporadic efforts to ensure civil rights in Utah, residents formed a local branch of the NAACP one hundred years ago. The Salt Lake Tribune just ran an article about the beginnings of the NAACP in Utah.
All images courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
Redlining was certainly a reality that I became aware of in Ogden during the 1960s and early 1970s while in high school and college. Our family lived for a few years in an area that blacks were allowed to rent in, but I was aware of no black homeowners in that area at that time. We were in a not so prosperous neighborhood of fairly new, but not expensive houses, and occasionally would hear jokes about that neighborhood from kids in the more affluent areas on the East Bench neighborhoods. Living in Ogden, where there was the highest concentration of blacks in Utah at the time, I saw and heard a lot of racially charged language and slurs. Growing up in that environment, it took me a while to overcome some of the ideas and attitudes that I absorbed.
Oh, Ogden. Even though it had a more diverse population, it sure did have its own challenges. And it also had a historic black church: Embry Chapel AME.
As I’ve worked on my project the past few years, it’s been eye-opening to come to understand how little most Americans know about slavery and race. Many people are entirely unfamiliar with the history of redlining and how government programs like the GI Bill so greatly benefitted white America while Jim Crow and school segregation systematically and generationally disadvantaged other populations.
If your ancestors were not chattel slaves and if they ever homesteaded or took out a government-backed housing loan or participated in the GI Bill or lived or went to school in the white part of a redlined community, you’re benefitting from intergenerational forms of wealth and education that most black families were denied.
On a lighter note, I’m hoping that people with local ties to Utah recognize either of those restaurants, especially the one that was misspelled!
Harman’s? Were they selling Kentucky Fried Chicken back in 1950?
Those restaurant locations are from the 1960 book, and I’m not finding an exact address online but based on feedback from another Utah native, that may indeed be the first franchise location of KFC.
Amy, no question that there were a lot of problems in Ogden. Everyone knew where “those neighborhoods” were, primarily West Ogden and anything west of Washington Boulevard and south of about 17th street. Ogden even came under scrutiny in the seventies, due to the one elementary that had 90% of the minority populations. The school district finally closed that school and bused the kids to other schools, but there was a lot of resistance to the whole process, as I recall. I know I said and did some things in those days that I cringe to recall. I didn’t really have any black friends, and made some acquaintances in high school, notably a debate partner that I worked with for a while. I think it took finally moving from Utah for me to see just how much I had been privileged, and how much of that racist climate I had absorbed. I know I still have things I need to overcome.
On the lighter note, I seem to recall the name of the Rotisserie Inn, but I am certain our family never ate there. Before I-15 was finished, it was a long drive from Ogden to Salt Lake, and our dining out excursions were mostly to Arctic Circle or McDonalds.
Ooops, missed the Harmon’s misspelling. Yes, they used to advertise that they were the first KFC franchise in the country, but my recollection was that was for their restaurant on State Street.
This is really great, Amy. Thank you.
The movie’s win certainly makes this a timely post; thank you, Amy.
When I first heard of the Green Book a few years ago, Paul R. and I briefly talked about the possibility of a digital history project focused on it. It was so preliminary, and so quickly eclipsed by the Century of Black Mormons project, that I’m not sure where it might have gone. In my mind, it would have been a study of each Utah place listed each year, determining who owned or managed the businesses; also hunting for stories of black travelers in Utah (almost certainly they would have been negative, because who would write a newspaper account of a trip that went without trouble?). We would have tried to identify, if possible, why each business owner/manager made the decision to serve black travelers.
One detail I remember is that the Hotel Roberts in Provo, near the City Center Temple, was listed for a few years, after its heyday as a fairly high class hotel but long before it became the transient hotel it became before it was torn down. Neither the owner nor the manager was black, so I wondered what led to their listing. Also, my great grandmother died in that building during the brief time it was a hospital; she lived just around the corner.
Thanks for alerting Keepa readers to this history.
Thank you, all, for your comments, including Kevin speaking about his personal experience. That sounds like a great project, Ardis, and hopefully someone will take it on.
Well, I didn’t recognize the SLC restaurants, but I’m pretty sure the YWCA is still in the same place, more or less.
Three weeks ago 83-year-old baseball great Frank Robinson died. Among the dozens of column-inches that the Washington Post printed remembering him was the following:
Frank Robinson Jr. was born Aug. 31, 1935, in Beaumont, Tex., the youngest of 10 children. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and he was 4 when he moved with his mother and her other children to California.
They settled in Oakland, where he grew up in a mixed-race neighborhood playing sports year-round.
[. . .]
After high school, Mr. Robinson signed with the Reds and was assigned to their minor-league affiliate in Ogden, Utah. In his 1988 autobiography “Extra Innings,” he wrote that he “didn’t know anything about racism or bigotry” before he became a professional baseball player, and that once he did, he experienced both repeatedly.
Ogden’s movie theater did not allow African Americans. While playing in towns in the South, he encountered slurs and segregation.
“I didn’t fight it because I was determined to be a major leaguer,” Mr. Robinson told the Sacramento Bee. “It was rough along the way in the minors, but I accepted it because I wanted to play baseball.”
(link)
I’ve just learned of a 2010 children’s picture book, Ruth and the Green Book by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and Gwen Strauss, about a family’s trip from Chicago to Alabama in 1952, where they learned of the necessity for the Green Book. I have a feeling that such a story book could give any of us greater emotional understanding.
I have a copy of Extra Innings, signed for me by the author, I might add. Regarding his time playing professional ball in Ogden, Robinson writes: