Arizona View Establishments by Arizona Cities
Arizona: The Green Book in an Arid Landscape
Once part of New Spain and Mexico, Arizona presents unique historical circumstances for travelers using The Green Book because the history of the Confederate Territory and State includes Indigenous settlements, Spanish colonial architecture and urbanism, as well as ranching, mining, agriculture, railroad—and the automobile. The expansive, rugged landscape, arid climate, and population of the 1912 State amount to a unique set of attributes that differ from many other US areas. Thus, as motels, tourist homes, and restaurants appeared in The Green Book, African American travelers during the mid-twentieth century would have encountered a range of experiences: modern national highways, cowboy and indigenous culture, Mexican food, and the material and social realities of Arizona’s towns and cities, including discrimination (and travel difficulties such as the one described in Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns, in 1953, where Dr. Pershing Foster could not find a way into Phoenix from the highway to stop for the night).
African American communities existed in Arizona prior to The Green Book. The Army’s Buffalo Soldiers arrived in the 1890s to protect and later build cities and communities. Fort Huachuca became the home for African American members of the US Cavalry in 1913. The town of Randolph, founded in 1925 and only 58 miles south of its then-rival town Phoenix, constituted the first African American community. And African American populations existed in Phoenix and Tucson with schools, such as the Dunbar School in Tucson (1912) and Phoenix (1925); churches, such as the Tanner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church (built in 1929 for a congregation organized in 1886); and social clubs, such as the Black Elks Clubs in Tucson and Phoenix.
Many early African American settlers went to Fort Huachuca, while others came to work as cowboys, farmhands in the agricultural fields of Marana and Pinal County, loggers up north, and in domestic settings. The first wave of African American settlers peaked in the 1930s. The second wave of settlement started after WWII. Arizona’s Green Book businesses, however, reflected only a small number of these African American communities. There were no listing in Randolph or near Fort Huachuca, for example. Instead, listings were in diverse and vibrant segregated communities of Arizona’s existing cities. Thus, the experience of tourism or migration or settlement as documented by the Green Book was decidedly urban—even though the only Arizona photo in the Green Book is set in an unknown ranching landscape!
Getting around Arizona in the 1940s required knowledge and planning. Largely due to the Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1921 & 1926, paved US Routes crisscrossed Arizona to connect small towns, large cities, and neighboring states, serving as important transportation links for the First and Second Great Migrations (between 1910 and 1940 and after WWII until 1970, respectively). Other established transportation routes in Arizona included rail and bus routes as well as air travel to Phoenix, Tucson, and the town of Douglas. Most Green Book listings in Arizona, however, appeared in Tucson and Phoenix and were situated on or near US Route 80.
With great distances between cities and services, standard tour books of Arizona recommend travelers carry water, gasoline, and layers of clothing to prepare for the long stretches of highway and for daily temperature swings. In this way, all travelers had to prepare and endure the afternoon heat, the night chill, and summer monsoons. The open road and its adventure may have shown no deference for who one was. But knowledge of local Green Book businesses helped Black travelers avoid discrimination in towns, cities, and neighborhoods.
—Clare Robinson
