{"id":11528,"date":"2024-01-22T10:59:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-22T15:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.archivingwheeling.org\/blog\/?p=11528"},"modified":"2024-02-01T13:15:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T18:15:43","slug":"making-a-way-out-of-no-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archivingwheeling.org\/blog\/making-a-way-out-of-no-way","title":{"rendered":"Making a Way Out of No Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Wheeling in the Green Book<\/h1>\n
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\u201cTravel 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\u2019s lifetime.\u201d ~ Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ann Thomas as a young nurse.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I first learned about the existence of \u201cThe Negro Motorist Green Book<\/a>\u201d from Ann Thomas<\/a>, when I interviewed her in 2012 for the second volume of The Wheeling Family<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both sides of Ann\u2019s family were originally from North Carolina before joining the Great Migration<\/a> and moving north for better treatment and increased opportunity. Ann\u2019s Aunt Esther May (her mother\u2019s sister) and Uncle Maxton \u201cMac\u201d 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 \u201cSingletary\u2019s,\u201d in an old Victorian residence on Chapline Street in the middle of what was, at the time, an established African American neighborhood.<\/p>\n

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Wheeling\u2019s \u201cLittle Harlem\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The family lived upstairs, and earned extra income by renting rooms to boarders. \u201cBecause of segregation,\u201d Ann said, \u201cthere was an economy in Wheeling that catered to the African American community.\u201d There was a robust black community on Chapline Street where the restaurant was located while Ann was growing up, primarily concentrated in the 1100 and 1200 blocks. Many of the businesses were Black-owned, but most of Wheeling remained segregated during Ann\u2019s childhood \u2013 \u201cJim Crow laws\u201d still forcibly separating blacks and whites in most public facilities. Thus, the Black neighborhood on Chapline Street north of 12th Street evolved into one of the nation\u2019s thousands of \u201cLittle Harlems,\u201d a reference (see Alvin Hall\u2019s Driving the Green Book<\/em><\/a> below) to the New York neighborhood that became the standard for Black culture during the Jim Crow era. It became, in effect, a second Wheeling, existing side-by side with White Wheeling, but with virtually no interaction.<\/p>\n

As Ann explained it, when the trains were still running in Wheeling, African American men who worked on the trains often needed a place to stay during an overnight layover. In segregated Wheeling, laws or policies prevented them from staying in the White only hotels. Even when famous Black people, like heavyweight champion Joe Louis, visited Wheeling, they had no choice but to stay in the African American neighborhood.<\/p>\n

In a 1936 speech<\/a> delivered for the Blue Triangle Branch of the YWCA\u2019s \u201cRace Relations Day,\u201d over radio station WWVA, Wheeling\u2019s only Black attorney at the time, Harry H. Jones, provided some detail for the economy of \u201cWheeling\u2019s Little Harlem,\u201d the Chapline Street neighborhood:<\/p>\n

\u201cA brief survey of our local colored population shows: that the group has six churches of three denominations; that it owns real estate worth about $500,000; that it manages one fraternal corporation worth nearly $130,000; one drug store, one tailor shop, two restaurants, two billiard parlors, and two beauty shops. In the professions, business, trades and personal service, the group is represented by: four physicians; two dentists; twelve clergymen; one lawyer; twenty-two school teachers; one chiropodist; two undertakers; two social workers; three tailors; four beauty parlor operators; two master hat cleaners, and a large number employed as cooks, maids, waiters, messengers, porters, bootblacks, janitors, elevator operators, chauffeurs, and barbers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n