Wheeling in the Green Book
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ~
I first learned about the existence of “The Negro Motorist Green Book” from Ann Thomas, when I interviewed her in 2012 for the second volume of The Wheeling Family.
Both sides of Ann’s family were originally from North Carolina before joining the Great Migration and moving north for better treatment and increased opportunity. Ann’s Aunt Esther May (her mother’s sister) and Uncle Maxton “Mac” Singletary were among the first of her family to choose Wheeling as their new home. They migrated from North Carolina and opened the New Dixie Restaurant, aka “Singletary’s,” in an old Victorian residence on Chapline Street in the middle of what was, at the time, an established African American neighborhood. Read More