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Ogunquit Maine

The Green Book Guides African-Americans to Safety in New England (and Elsewhere)

African-Americans driving through New England from the 1930s to the 1960s carried the Green Book to guide them to friendly hotels, restaurants and service stations.

It was a time when they might find themselves in sundown towns, which banned minorities from within municipal limits after dark. The practice wasn’t limited to the Jim Crow South — it happened in New England, too.

James Loewen, a historian who researches sundown towns, found evidence of a sign in Connecticut that said, “Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark.”

Always alert to potential embarrassment or danger, African-Americans carried blankets, packed lunch and even toted cans of gasoline when they took to the road.

And they carried the Green Book.

The Green Book

Victor H. Green was an African-American letter carrier in New York City. Among his deliveries were Jewish guides that told Jewish readers what restaurants and hotels didn’t admit them. He asked his colleagues in the postal service to help him by asking around on their routes about good places to stay. He then published the first Green Book in 1936, focusing on metropolitan New York City.

The 10-page book, which sold for 25 cents, included listings for restaurants, service stations, hotels, tourist homes, taverns, liquor stores, beauty parlors, nightclubs, drugstores and tailors.

It included a quotation from Mark Twain on its cover:

Travel is fatal to prejudice.

Expansion

The Green Book expanded over the years to include every U.S. state. It also included advertisements for lodgings, for Ford automobiles and for service stations. During World War II, Victor Green suspended publication, but by 1949 it ran to more than 80 pages.

Esso (now ExxonMobil) promoted the Green Book because of the work of James ‘Billboard’ Jackson, the company’s first black marketing specialist. Esso sponsored the guide, telling its black customers it allowed them to ‘go further with less anxiety.’ African-American drivers could buy the Green Book and get maps at Esso stations. Shell, on the other hand, had a reputation for turning away black customers.

Green’s timing was good. African-Americans were buying cars as soon as they could afford them to avoid the indignities of traveling on trains or buses. The interstate highway system was still in the future, so motorists had to drive through unfamiliar towns where they might not be welcome.

Journalist George Schuyler, a Rhode Island native, explained in 1930,

…all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult.

Obsolescence

Green looked forward to the day people wouldn’t need the Green Book. In the 1949 edition he wrote,

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.

The year the Civil Rights Act passed, 1964, was the Green Book’s last. By then Civil Rights activists demanded equal access and discouraged voluntary segregation.

Jim Crow Bible

Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe

During the Jim Crow era, the Green Book was the Bible of black travel. Today it is a guide to a past that hasn’t completely vanished.

In the 1949 Green Book, for example, listings for the African-American neighborhood in Boston’s South End include eight hotels and guest houses, nine restaurants, a couple of barbers, the Savoy Nightclub (where Malcolm X once shined shoes) and a half-dozen tailors.

Charlie’s, one of the restaurants listed on Columbus Avenue, was where Sammy Davis. Jr., used to tap dance for change as a young boy. Charlie’s, now known as Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe, closed in 2014 but reopened under new ownership.

As New Haven revives the jazz that once made it a mecca for musicians, the 1949 Green Book limns the Dixwell neighborhood where Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday performed. There was the Phillis Wheatley Hotel, the Dr. M.F. Allen tourist home, the Belmont Restaurant, the Elks Nightclub and Lillian’s Paradise.

The Monterey Café, where owner Rufus Greenlee danced with Josephine Baker, lasted long enough to foster New Haven’s Hip Hop scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Providence

Most of the accommodations listed in the Green Book in New England were small hotels and tourist homes owned by African Americans. In cities, they were usually found in marginal or minority neighborhoods.

One notable exception was the Providence Biltmore, an elegant 19-story hotel in the middle of downtown. It was built in 1922 after the Providence Chamber of Commerce campaigned for a signature hotel where people could gather for important civic and cultural events.

The hotel had an open occupancy policy, accepting both black and white guests. But it took a step further by actually paying for a listing in the Green Book. Beginning in 1941, it simply reads, “Biltmore” under the heading “Providence.”

The Providence Biltmore closed in 1975, but reopened four years later after renovation and a landmark designation. It changed hands, underwent another renovation, changed hands again, and was renamed Graduate Providence.

Oak Bluffs

Today, the Town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard is a resort community visited by such prominent African-Americans as Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 1956, it provided even more of a reprieve for upper-middle-class African-Americans like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote speeches on the porch of an Oak Bluffs cottage.

In 1948, Dorothy West wrote a novel about the town’s social life, The Living Is Easy. That year the Green Book listed eight places where cottages could be rented in Oak Bluffs. (You can watch an online documentary about Oak Bluffs for free here.)

The Shearer Cottage on Martha’s Vineyard catered to black vacationers starting in 1912. Charles and Henrietta Shearer built their wooden tourist home in the Highlands area of Oak Bluffs. Charles had been born into slavery but graduated from Hampton Institute in Virginia, then worked as a teacher.

Shearer Cottage is still in business and still run by the Shearer family.

Ironically, the Green Book didn’t list the Shearer Cottage until 1963, along with such establishments as Brownie’s Cottage, Cinderella Cottage and Dunmere-By-The-Sea.

Rock Rest

Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine

One New England destination popular among African-Americans did not list in the Green Book: Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine. Clayton and Hazel Sinclair once owned the 2-1/2 story wooden Cape, running it as a guest house from 1946 to 1977. They advertised by sending postcards to their mailing list.

Clayton worked as a chauffeur in New York, Hazel as a ladies’ maid to a family that summered in Maine. When Clayton and Hazel decided to relocate, Clayton found a dilapidated house on Route 103 and Kittery and promised to fix it up. He did, and Hazel’s reputation as a cook drew enough guests to run Rock Rest as a business in the summer. Clayton Sinclair also worked in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Hazel catered in the off season. Today the house is on the National Register of Historic Places. On June 4, 2022, two historic markers were scheduled to be unveiled commemorating Rock Rest.

For an interactive map showing places listed in a 1956 Negro Travelers’ Green Book, click here. View the text of the 1949 Green Book, courtesy The Henry Ford, here.

Photos: Oak Bluffs by Elkman at Wikipedia, Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe by John Phelan at Wikipedia. Rock Rest By Robm154 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35858018.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about New England’s sundown towns (which only allowed white people to stay after dark) here.

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Edward Hopper in New England

Edward Hopper is known for his paintings of urban isolation, and yet he did some of his best loved work in rural and small town New England. From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death in 1967.

Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, 1927, courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Lighthouse Hill, 1927, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann. And all along the coast he painted lighthouses.

Lighthouses had not yet become an artistic cliché. It was Hopper who made the lighthouse a representative and enduring American image, observed Carl Little in Edward Hopper’s New England.

Edward Hopper may have seen something of himself in the lighthouses. He was 6’5”, taciturn and an artistic loner. Preferring representational art, he stood apart from the abstract painters of his day. He explained why:

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was born July 22, 1882, in Nyack N.Y., to a prosperous middle-class family that encouraged his interest in art.

He studied under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at what became the Parsons New School of Design. To support himself, he went into illustration, which he hated. He took three trips to Europe to alleviate the tedium of commercial work. But in the end trips to Europe weren’t enough to inspire him back at his studio in New York City. As he approached 30 he sank into depression, sitting for days at a time before his easel ‘in hopeless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell.

Gloucester Harbor, 1912

In 1912 he took his first trip to Gloucester, Mass., which broke that spell.

Leaving his train at the Gloucester station, he could walk to his lodgings downtown. He wandered around the city sketching and painting. The trolley allowed him to explore any neighborhood he wished. Today, visitors can see the same steps, sidewalks, houses and rocks he painted a century ago. (To take a self-guided Hopper tour of Hopper’s Gloucester, click here.)

The Coast

He spent the summers of 1914 and 1915 in Ogunquit, Maine, and returned to the coast again and again.

Blackhead, Monhegan, 1919. Whitney Museum of American Art

In 1916-1919 he went to Monhegan Island in Maine. There he carted around wood panels, usually 12” by 16,” and painted the rocky cliffs with thick, loose strokes.

He was back in Gloucester in 1923 for the city’s 300^th anniversary celebration. That was the year he started painting in watercolor, an excellent medium for New England’s light. Painting next to him was fellow student Jo Nivison, who he married the next year. Jo modeled for many of the women in his paintings. – like Cape Cod Morning.

The Mansard Roof, 1923, Brooklyn Museum

Edward Hopper once said all he wanted to do was ‘to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ In Gloucester in 1923 he painted the superb The Mansard Roof, treating light and shadow in a way that gave an inanimate structure life and motion. The Brooklyn Museum bought the painting, and a show of his watercolors then sold out. Hopper was in his 40s and coming into his own.

During his lifetime he painted more than 100 works from Gloucester, returning in 1924, 1926 and 1928.

Two on the Aisle, 1927, Toledo Museum of Art

Wheels

In 1927 he sold Two on the Aisle for $1,500, the most he’d ever sold a painting for, and he bought a car with the money.

The car allowed him to explore more of New England – Rockland and Portland in Maine, South Royalton in Vermont, South Truro on Cape Cod. On a visit to Portland in 1927 he painted one of his many lighthouses, Lighthouse and Buildings.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod. He explained why in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous–perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

His wife called it a ‘wonderful land of bare green sandy hills.’

Corn Hill, 1930, McNay Art Museum

Cape Cod and Vermont

Instead of mansard roofs and cliffs, sand dunes and rolling hills made up the Cape’s landscape. Edward Hopper tackled that subject on his first summer on Cape Cod in 1930 with paintings like Corn Hill.

At first they rented houses in South Truro. Then in 1934, the Hoppers built their summer house in South Truro, a simple, shingled house.

First Branch of the White River, Vermont, 1938, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Hoppers also took side trips in the summer, to the Southwest, Mexico and Vermont. From 1935-38, they visited Vermont. In ’37 and ’38 they stayed in South Royalton, near White River Junction. There Edward Hopper painted some of his best watercolor landscapes.

Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936, Carnegie Museum of Art

In 1939 he painted Cape Cod Afternoon – an image of an imaginary place he pieced together from bits and pieces in the vicinity. A doorway came from Orleans, the billowing grass from South Truro.

Isolation and Solitude

Gas, 1940, Museum of Modern Art

His paintings began to explore the themes of isolation and solitude: There were more small houses, more interiors, more lonely people. And he continued to invent. Gas, like Cape Cod Afternoon, was a pastiche of elements he’d seen and sketched in different places.

Cape Cod Morning, 1950, Smithsonian Museum of American Art

In the late 1940s his creative juices dried up, and he told a friend he wished he could paint because he was tired of reading and going to the movies. Edward Hopper did paint Cape Cod Morning in 1950 with Jo, as was often the case, posing as the woman in the window.

He suffered health problems in the 1950s and painted only about five paintings a year in the 1960s. Then on May 15, 1967, he died.

Jo bequeathed his work, more than 3,000 pieces, to the Whitney Museum of American Art. She died 10 months later.

With thanks to Edward Hopper’s New England by Carl Little. This story about Edward Hopper was updated in 2022.

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Charles Woodbury Paints a Red Bathing Suit

Charles Woodbury painted in quick, sure strokes, according to his maxim: “Paint in verbs, not nouns.”

‘The Red Bathing Suit’ below is typical Woodbury: an energetic, shimmering work painted in one of his favorite spots, a pool on the coast of Ogunquit, Maine. The subject is one of three girls who wore red bathing suits so their father could keep an eye on them while they played in the water.

The Red Bathing Suit

From his teenage years throughout his life, Charles Woodbury enjoyed remarkable success as a painter of seascapes and coastal villages.

Charles Woodbury

Charles Woodbury was born July 14, 1864 in Lynn, Mass. He took a full load of courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — all the while exhibiting paintings. He was largely self-taught. At 19, he became the youngest member of the Boston Art Club.

Charles Woodbury

Woodbury graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering, but he never had to use his degree for a day job. From early on he belonged to the Lynn Beach Painters, an often-overlooked school of art. Other Lynn Beach painters include Nathanial L. Berry, Edward Burrill, William Partridge Burpee, C. E. L. Green, Thomas Clarkson Oliver and Edward A. Page.

He painted the coast from Boston’s North Shore to Nova Scotia.

He studied in Paris and Holland while in his late 20s, then established a winter studio in Boston. Summers he spent in Ogunquit, Maine, a small fishing village on the coast. Later in life he spent winters in the Caribbean, painting watercolors and sailing from island to island.

Perkins Cove, Ogunquit

Woodbury started a summer art school in Ogunquit that continued on after his death on Jan. 21, 1940.

His work can be viewed in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Harvard University Art Museums; at the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, Mass.; in Maine at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Portland Museum of Art and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick; in New Hampshire at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester; and in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

With thanks to Avery Galleries. Photo of Charles Woodbury by unknown photographer.

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