For the past five years, using contemporary interactive mapping software as a dynamic tool to guide and coordinate his route, I have traveled America mapping and documenting sites listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book for each particular region.
Some of these sites have been repurposed and converted into different kinds of establishments, or transformed by waves of gentrification. Some have been preserved as surreal time capsules, or summarily marked by way of plaques. Some have disappeared altogether, with only street signs and fragments of buildings, long-unoccupied properties and weed-covered lots bearing silent witness to formerly thriving Black businesses and neighborhoods.
Arguably the most famous Green Book site is the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The rooms he occupied at the Lorraine have been preserved the way they were over half a century ago, as if frozen in time.
An empty frame on a signpost above the dirt road entryway to the El Camino seems all too symbolic of the place's current state of disrepair. Still operative, the motel functions mostly as a full-time residence for month-to-month renters.
Built in 1915 and owned by the National Park Service, Crater Lake Lodge is one of many National Park sites listed in the Green Book. Though National Parks were desegregated before the country as a whole, it remains questionable how many people of color actually stayed at the Lodge.
The three-story Hong Kong Hotel is now located in Chinatown, indicating the transitory nature of its neighborhood demographics, which have shifted from African-American to predominantly Chinese.
Now a City of Seattle landmark, the Doric New Washington opened its doors in 1908, an imposing, stately brick-façade building typical of its period and predating the glass-and-steel era of architecture.
Shot at a rare moment when no cars were passing by, the stillness and detachment of the Capitol Hill Motel keep this typical drive-in motel in the time capsule suggested by its nostalgic signage.
Since its opening in 1927, the Roosevelt Hotel, with its lit-up sign perched atop the building, has been part of Hollywood Boulevard's gaudy, gilded tribute to the halcyon days of the movie industry's erstwhile glory days.
Nowadays, the Monte Carlo houses the offices of an injury attorney, who advertises his business all over town. These kinds of lawyers often have a stronger presence in economically less viable, Black and brown neighborhoods.
George T. Dunlap built his small bungalow home in 1906 in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento. He expanded it as the family grew, and opened the dining room as a restaurant in 1930, continuing the business until his retirement in 1968. Now Dunlap's Dining Room is a National Landmark.
Formerly a motel, Crater Cottages now actually consists of apartments, which people rent on a permanent basis.
The six-story Hotel Olympian was built directly to the north of Sylvester Park in 1918, when the seat of government moved to the Old State Capitol Building in Downtown Olympia. Its name - in fainted paint high on the side of the building - is only visible from the highway.
The Dittlmore's Court was the first of several motels of which I realized they mainly operate as permanent dwellings and 'homes' for low-income families, who often live with six people in a room meant for two - a circumstance that makes the ornate sign outside the place look all the more ironic.
These two Seattle Green Book sites Catherine’s Beauty Parlor and New Richmond Hotel are notably located by the railway system, revealing a proximity between accommodations and means of travel.
Cascade Inn, located in Bellingham, Washington State, right by the Canadian border, is one of the country’s northernmost Green Book locations. Like many dwellings of its kind, this place no longer operates as a motor lodge, but provides a permanent residence for housing-insecure families or groups of families with children, who live in these ‘homes’ full time.
I intended to stay at the Rodeway Inn, nostalgically trying to capture a feeling of being transported back in time, only to find it is now a less than savory home to sundry illicit transitory practices.
A typical garden motel with a kidney-shaped interior pool, the Raywood Motel has been retrofitted as a jail with bars on the windows to accommodate its current function as a halfway house for inmates transitioning from prison to society.
Characteristic for this kind of hotel, the top two floors of the Multnomah consist of section rooms, while the lower half featured a music venue and bar.
Established by W. J. Summers in 1944, the Summers Hotel became known for its basement jazz club, the Subway Lounge, which offered popular late night shows from the late 1980s until the hotel's demolition in 2004. Now only a marker and the former driveway remain.
In its heyday, the Ben Moore Hotel and Majestic Café was one of the most major hub of Black culture and community in Montgomery, and an important gathering place for the Civil Rights Movement. The top floor of the hotel used to be a ballroom, the ground floor a café, but now the whole structure stands in disrepair, an empty shell of its its former status, adjacent a vacant lot that marks another, 'erased' Green Book site.
The stucco Spanish roof tile and faded sign hardly make the Sunset Motel a noticeable roadside presence. Like so many Green Book sites sprinkled across the American landscape, it blends into the surroundings and its historical background dissipates.
Covered in advertising billboards, the Benjamin Franklin is located on the opposite side of the street from where the Benjamin Franklin Hotel stood, which was built in 1929 and demolished in 1980 to make room for the North Tower of the Westin Seattle - the tallest hotel in the city.
During my Green Book travels, I drive through historically important Black spaces - of culture, leisure, enterprise, activism - that are part of a parallel journey.
I visualize these places and the people who populate them in the style and hue of cyanotypes (a hand-coated chemical process based on UVA radiation from sunlight), using the ‘blueprinting’ technique and oval-shaped outline popularized in the 1840s.
Through a pre-modern mode of photographic rendering, I create a series of 'postcards from the road,' framing landmark locations within a historical record that has all too often excised the Black American experience from its discourse.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge, where peaceful protesters defied brutal police attacks in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.
In January 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Montgomery home was bombed by suspected white supremacists. From his damaged porch, he gave an impromptu speech advocating non-violent resistance to racist terror.
The Tuskegee Army Airfield, where the US military’s first squadron of Black aviators were stationed, who fought in World War II.
Built in 1877, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor from 1954 to 1960. From the pulpit as well as the basement office, he was a leading figure in the community mobilization and civil rights activism of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Patrons inside the New China Club in Reno, which opened its doors in 1952 and catered to Asian and African Americans.
Solitary cross-country travel instills an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and isolation, in which sometimes only faith - through tradition and introspection - offers a spiritual and practical path forward.
I extend my spatial journey to an odyssey of time and mind by creating empowering visual narratives that highlight continuity across generations of African American individuals and communities on the move.
The perspective in these images is both archival and imaginative, as I combine location and landscape photographs from around the country with carefully staged self-portraits, contextualized through historical reenactment.
I depict myself dressed in 1920s attire, and seated as a passenger in a Pullman train car from the period, which was the company’s heyday, before the automobile and the airplane became increasingly popular modes of transportation. Though Pullman Porters were often recruited from former slave states, expected to wait on white passengers with utmost subservience and treated accordingly, they also experienced geographical and social mobility in ways inaccessible to most other African Americans at the time. Traveling the country and being able to save money to create life opportunities for their children, they were a driving force in the Great Migration. My stare conveys the ambiguity of the Porter’s status in the racial order, exuding a sense of uneasy anticipation, while my solitude in the pristine space adds a surreal touch. (As trains crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into the South, the social hierarchy was reflected in seat assignment: as opposed to on buses, Black passengers typically sat in the front cars, which were the dirtiest, because they were located closest to the coal-powered engine.)
The smallness of my parked truck against the background of a looming rock formation barely hints at the sense of vulnerability, isolation and sheer panic that came with a two-hour drive along a deserted, winding two-lane road up and over this mountain pass to reach the hotel on the other side by dusk. This is the aspect of solitary travel where the elements seem an overwhelming, daunting obstacle, and only faith - reciting The Lord’s Prayer like a mantra behind the wheel - offers both a spiritual and a practical path forward, dispelling apprehension at getting stuck and overcoming the compulsion to turn back. Only after hiking up to a look-out point from the parking area and talking to other people, did I realize this was a volcanic landscape, and did primal fear finally give way to awestruck serenity.
Upon America’s entry into the War in 1941, industrialist Henry Kaiser’s Portland-based Oregon Shipbuilding Company attracted a massive influx of Black workers, who were part of the Great Migration. Racist housing authorities in Portland - today still one of the nation’s least diverse cities - showed neither the desire nor the expediency required to provide homes for these workers, so Keyser had Vanport built as a segregated settlement to house his labor force. Over the course of just 110 days in 1942, the town went up on the marshland between the Columbia Slough and the Columbia River. Physically segregated from Portland, Vanport was constructed as a temporary settlement (its 10414 apartments and homes consisted mostly of wooden blocks and fiberboard walls) and precariously located, surrounded by a system of dikes that kept the Columbia River at bay. In its heyday, Vanport was the second largest city in Oregon and the largest housing project in the country, with 40,000 residents, including 6000 African Americans. (Many Black folk in Portland trace their roots back to this community.) Following white flight after the end of the War, African Americans made up a third of Vanport’s dwindling population, all of whom were displaced when, on Memorial Day afternoon, 1948, one of the dikes broke and the water from Smith Lake inundated and destroyed the town. The rupture in this wall represents not only the dike break causing the 1948 flood that swept away Vanport, but also the line of racial discrimination and the challenge of tenuous integration its community came to stand for. Today almost nothing is left of Vanport's infrastructure; the land where the city stood is occupied by the Portland International Raceway, the Herons Lake Golf Club, and a wildlife preserve.
There is a magical aspect to this threefold depiction of myself in Fisk University’s small, intimate theater space. Appearing as performer, viewer and audience member, I summon a reunion of successive generations of students and teachers at Fisk, while also assuming different positions from which to reach the side of the stage, where a drop hatch offered access to the tunnel system that ran underneath the school grounds. These images convey an acute concern of safety from racist terror that remains relevant to the present day, as borne out in recent bomb threats at over a dozen Historically Black Colleges.
I challenge and reimagine the quintessential American narrative of unbridled freedom to roam the land by exposing the double standard behind this mythical promise of boundless mobility when one is at risk for 'moving while Black'.
The provision of safe and dignified accommodations and the access to escape routes from violent persecution form part of a vibrant historical tradition of African American resilience and self-preservation, which is not just concerned with personal survival, but with a spirit of community kept alive and enshrined in gathering places like schools, churches and barber shops.
Founded in 1866, Fisk University was constructed to include numerous safe places and secret passageways that allowed students and faculty to escape white mobs who would invade and terrorize their campus. As I follow such a flight route, located inside a church, the blurry visual effect suggests the speed at which one had to move to get away, but also conjures up a ghostly realm in which the figures of so many individuals who ascended this ladder to hide away from attack blend into one.
These images convey an acute concern of safety from racist terror that remains relevant to the present day, as demonstrated by bomb threats at 57 of the 107 Historically Black Colleges at the start of February - Black History Month - 2022.
This shotgun house is gradually being reclaimed by nature. The land on which the house stands has been contested since it was built: formerly located on a plantation, the plot was bought from the owner after it had become part of a sharecropping system; now it is the only place in the vicinity that has not been bought up by a development company.
Located inside the now vacant Ben Moore Hotel, the Malden Brothers Barbershop was one of the building's original tenants. Still going strong, they serviced many clients in the neighborhood over the years and decades, most famous among whom was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nowadays, proprietor Nelson Malden presides over an extraordinary collection of memorabilia that adorn the shop - from newspaper clippings to pictures and signs - that make the business a living museum.
This is the outside of the home of prolific artist Joe Minter, which serves as a sanctuary for the many art works - drawings, paintings, sculptures - he has created.
These 45 'target' images, distributed over 5 grids and created through the process of solarization (the double exposure of a light-sensitive substrate during chemical development) constitute a memorial tribute to Black men, women and children who were excessively - often lethally - brutalized for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The generic multiplicity of the locations (depicted through Google Maps) in this tragically ongoing series traces back the cyclical nature of a history of violent oppression that keeps repeating itself - from George Floyd (in Minneapolis, 2020) to Rodney King (in Los Angeles, 1991) to Emmett Till (in Mississippi, 1955) - at the risk of desensitizing the public.
1200 people from the Harlem and Morningside Heights neighborhoods in New York City died from COVID-19. I was invited by Betty-Sue Hertz, director and chief curator of the Wallach Art Gallery, and Professor Holger Klein of Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology, to contribute a conceptual memorial to these victims of the pandemic as part of the exhibition to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, The Way We Remember: Fritz Koenig’s Sphere, 9/11, and the Politics of Memory.
The idea behind this memorial combines the aesthetic of an indelibly solid and permanent, monumental façade carved into the bedrock with an airy lightness generated by points of light that come through apertures and bear testimony to an enduring legacy of survival.
My concept suggests a homecoming: the fronts of three brownstones, which represent the iconic architecture of the area, hewn into and protruding from the rockside to resemble Petra in Jordan. Visitors are invited to share an experience of serenity with each other and with the souls of the departed in a spirit of mournful communal remembrance.
This rendering shows a view from the back of the space with the entrance on the far end. People looking at the names on the walls and sitting by the reflective pool convey the dimensions of the whole.
This cross section of the memorial shows the stairs going down from the entrance on the left, the names of the deceased inscribed on the wall, and the light from the sky falling through the apertures in the ceiling.
This view from the entryway shows the inside of the space, with the names of the neighborhood's COVID victims etched into the walls, with light shining down through openings in the ceiling, reflecting the sky in the water of the basin.
A mock-up of the façade of the memorial shows how it is modeled on the front of brownstone buildings, which are representative of the area's architectural beauty.
The memorial site is located in Morningside Park, a thirty-acre public park in Upper Manhattan. The park grounds reach from 110th to 123rd Street and feature sections of exposed bedrock, which gave me the idea of building the memorial inside the rock face.
This brief animated fly-through simulation offers a three-dimensional impression of the memorial. It is visualized from the viewpoint of a visitor approaching the façade from the park, walking through the entrance, around the space and back out.
Generated by Black Mississippians during Reconstruction, the Farish Street District in Jackson became the largest economically independent African American community in Mississippi by the middle of the twentieth century. Farish Street flourished as a Black housing, business and entertainment hub in response to socioeconomic and cultural deprivations and constraints suffered by local people of color under Jim Crow.
With the intensification of the Civil Rights struggle into the 50s and 60s, the 'Jackson Movement' became a force for change toward desegregation. For the Farish Street community, this progress came at a price, as people moved away in pursuit of new opportunities - a migration pattern mirrored by the dynamic of 'white flight' out of Jackson at large - and the neighborhood was hollowed out from the inside. eventually leaving behind a vacated, decayed, shuttered shell of its former self.
Over recent decades, initiatives toward the revitalization of Farish Street have faced a plethora of challenges, leading its proponents to increasingly organize their efforts around local involvement and supervision.
Someone painted this image of a woman on a boarded-up dwelling to imbue the abandoned neighborhood with humanity, life and beauty, though a chain link fence has been put in place to keep people at bay.
This view down Main Street around the middle of the day should reveal the lively hustle and bustle of people, but instead an eery desolation emanates from the center of the neighborhood.
Bathed in bright sunshine, this corner building with a tree in front of it offers an image of lightness rather than the weight of a complex past that has defied more than forty years of efforts to rehabilitate Farish Street to its former glory.
Farish Street was named after Walter Farish, a former slave who took up residence on the Northeast corner of Davis and what would become Farish Street. The 'Do Not Enter' sign carries poignant connotations of meaning vis-à-vis this once gloriously self-reliant, now eerily ghostly Black District.
The shadow of a lamppost cuts an oddly abstract, ironically hovering figure between the boards that close off any access to this building.
The only sign of life on this empty street is the drawing of a person, an image of residual humanity that awaits revitalization.
During the first half of the twentieth century, like the Fourth Ward in Houston, Walnut Street in Louisville, and Greenwood in Tulsa, Farish Street established itself as a self-sustaining haven of Black prosperity. One local resident and business owner calls it "the Black Mecca of Mississippi," prior to integration. Now the dilapidated exterior of its proud legacy betokens a dormant community spirit.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Stevens Kitchen welcomed prominent civil rights leaders and politicians, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, the Crystal Palace Ballroom was the most popular night club on Farish Street, hosting legendary performers like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Fats Waller.
