View Green Book Listings
How our digital archive works
Below are the Ann Arbor and Detroit listings from the 1950-1955 Green Books. Many of the listings appeared in all five years with little change within the categories we chose so we have decided to organize them by category: hotels, nightclubs, and taverns. Because we approached their project from a student perspective, we picked categories that might have been most relevant to them as travelers. Each individual listing (when possible) has a current photo of the listing's address, a Google Map link to explore the current area, photo(s) of what the building looked like when in operations as the business listed in the Green Book, links to learn more about the business and/or more archival photos.
We felt that analyzing the difference in the amount of listings in Ann Arbor opposed to Detroit from a student perspective would be important for two reasons. 1. We’re current University of Michigan students at the Ann Arbor campus. 2. The lived experiences of Black students in Ann Arbor and Detroit today reflect what we found in the archive: only two hotels were listed in Ann Arbor for all 5 years we looked at with no other categories listed. This is juxtaposed with Detroit who had 13 categories and over 50 listings in the same period. In 2023, many Black students at U-M Ann Arbor would similarly tell you that they feel Detroit has more creative, educational, personal care, and retail spaces that are made for and by people who look like them.