This morning, eight of my classmates and I met in front of the McCabe Library. Our professor soon drove up with a van and we piled in to drive to Center City.
The class was Music 005, Music and Dance Cultures of the World. Today was a hands-on experience, and we went into Philadelphia to go on a guided tour of Green Book sites. The Green Book, published annually from 1936 until 1966, served as a guidebook for African-American travelers; it listed hotels, restaurants, theaters, stores, gyms, etc. which were welcoming to, and safe for, Black Americans. Though it initially only covered New York City, the high demand for such a product led to the eventual coverage of most of the United States (and even some international territories), including our very own Philadelphia.
The creator of the book was a postman named Victor Green (that’s right, it wasn’t just like the little red book, it was named after someone; however, in a clever marketing ploy, the book was also always green). Green tapped into his network of the post office to ask for businesses that were amenable to African-Americans, resulting in the eventual 1936 publication of The Negro Motorist Green Book.
(An interesting side note I learned: since the post office was one of relatively few stable, well-paying jobs that Black Americans could get, it was by far the largest employer of African-Americans in Philadelphia; as many as thirty percent of the Black population was apparently employed by the postal service at some point. In fact, it had such a large impact that one of the businesses we passed by, a Jazz bar that was eventually featured in the green book, was called The Postal Card.)
Of the hundreds of Green Book businesses listed at some point, only three remain as the same businesses in the same buildings. We began the tour next to one, the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, meeting across from it at the theater where I saw Wicked when it passed through Philly a year ago. We had a brief discussion about the history of the book itself, and then set off to see our dozen or so locations.
Our guide told us the histories of every place we passed and what they had been and done; James Brown credits the owner of the Carlyle hotel with lending him the money he needed to keep his career on track. In 1945, at that theater, John Coltrane saw the concert that inspired him to be a jazz musician. At that hotel, Billie Holiday was arrested for drug possession.
It was interesting to hear our guide talk about all of these sites and their histories, but it also existed in juxtaposition with the modern day reality; most of these are no longer the same businesses. The hotel where Holiday was arrested is now a charter school; the bar that she was singing in when the police were first called on her is now a paved parking lot. To see the change, and to hear about all of the history that had been erased (and the erasure that is still actively going on), presented me with a lot to think about.
What do we really mean by the history of a place? Is this concrete strip more valuable than any other because of what happened in the past here? Where is the line between nostalgia and history, and should there be a line? Do we have a responsibility to preserve history if it actively interferes with the lives of people now? What is the inherent value in preserving something anyways? Now, instead of a museum or a dusty old building, there is a beautiful mural made of glass, throwing mottled dapples of light onto the sidewalk, on an apartment building that is surely home to many thousands more memories. Shouldn’t we, if we can, preserve everything – not just the physical places, but the ephemeral beauty of the present moment?
These are questions that I will be leaving to my essay that I will be writing about this walk. After it was over and we had said goodbye to our guide, we all went to a Philly restaurant and, for a little while, drowned our questions in collard greens and pomegranate lemonade.
