You’ve seen the film, but did you know it was playing up here?

By Olivia Gunn Kotsishevskaya and Jake Doolittle

July/August 2019

In 1936, with Jim Crow laws shaming our country, Victor Hugo Green, an African American postal worker in Harlem, courageously compiled a list of homes and inns across the United States that were open to black travelers—including Maine. These safe havens would be listed in The Negro Motorist Green-Book, published annually until 1967.

Our Own Backyard

Though the South was infamous for its Jim Crow laws, New England states are not left unstained. “In the movie The Green Book, it’s almost as if they’re living in two different worlds—Dr. Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali) was living in one world, and Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), driving the car, was in another world,” says civil rights leader and former state legislator Gerald E. Talbot, who senses the spoken and unspoken sentiments in both worlds. “I’m what you call a light-skin black man. The neighborhood I come from is a black neighborhood. When I moved from Bangor to Portland, I had a job cooking. I worked here for maybe a week when the manager finally asked me, ‘What are you, anyway?’ I said, ‘I’m African American.’ The next week, I didn’t have a job.”

Word of Mouth

The first edition of the Green Book named six Maine locations, including Rose Cummings’ Old Orchard Beach home at 110 Portland Avenue. The names of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, Cab Calloway, and Lionel Hampton can be found in the registry.

In Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People by co-authors Gerald E. Talbot and H.H. Price, Talbot writes, “The blacks who came to southern Maine in the summertime, either as entertainers or for their own vacations and refreshment, stayed at black-owned establishments. During the first part of the twentieth century, Rosvell “Rose” Emerson Cummings ran her business, The Homestead, at Old Orchard Beach for a roster of now-famous guests…”

Great Minds

“Rose was very wise,” says LeVonne Harris, her granddaughter. “She was also a good business person, and she was very committed to it. The people who came, everybody knew each other. When they’d sit down in the dining room, it was like one great big family.” The family had heard that the home was listed in the Green Book, but it wasn’t a “walk-in place,” says Harris.

“I can recall John Hope Franklin, a professor at Duke University. He wrote several volumes of books on black history. He and his wife would occasionally come up here. My uncle graduated from Bates, and he would send his classmates to my grandmother’s. W.E.B. Du Bois, who’s in the history books for his controversial ideas on government, he came up one summer.” (See “The W.E.B. Du Bois Files,” February/March 2014.)

In 2004, the Cummings’s home was included on the National Register of Historic Places. Today the registry of guests from 1923 to 1993 is part of the African American Collections of Maine at the University of Southern Maine.

Leave the Light On

On an unassuming street off of St. John in Portland sits a 1900s four-unit, cream, shingled home. Before World War II, the Green Lantern operated on the first floor of 28 A Street, the Thomas House, across from Portland’s former Union Station.

“There was a little green lantern underneath the bay window by the door, that was lit up even in winter or if it was stormy,” writes Norma McIlvaine Readdy, niece of owners Ben and Edie Thomas. Readdy describes the home’s story in detail in Maine’s Visible Black History. As a girl, she lived at the home with her aunt, uncle, and grandmother.

Directly across from Union Station, the Green Lantern provided board for black sailors and soldiers. “There was no USO, no place for black sailors to go to play the jukebox or get together,” writes Readdy. “They could go down to the corner store and buy beer and bring it back to the Green Lantern Grill,” where soldiers and sailors could join trainmen, chefs, and “prizefighters” at the long table, play cards, and listen to music. The Thomases would go on to open the Marian Anderson USO Center in Portland, which stemmed from the Colored Community Center founded in the early 1940s.

Water’s Edge

Overlooking the St. Croix River with Canada’s border in the distance, Brooks Bluff Cottages was owned by Ernie Brown, since deceased, in 1920. Located in Robbinston, the cottages were listed in the Green Book as being “just 12 miles east of Calais.”

“The John Nehemiah Brewer House in Robbinston, still standing and occupied, is one of the definite Underground Railroad safe places in Maine,” says H.H. Price, co-author of Maine’s Visible Black History. The H.H. Price Collection on the Underground Railroad in Maine is archived at the Special Collections of the Bangor Public Library. “It’s directly across the St. Croix River from St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, where there is a traditional black community with old burial sites. In 1997, Dr. John W. Miner, in his 90s and of nearby Calais, gave a sworn statement about the Brewer House to Ms. Frances M. Raye of The Border Historical Society in Eastport (also nearby) about when he was a boy. John was visiting his grandparents in Nova Scotia, and he heard directly from an old African man that he and other runaways from slavery hid in the Brewer House’s attic for days until they were ferried at nighttime across the river to Canada, where they would be free.

“One of the Maine routes runaways used in the mid-1800s to reach Canada was an old Indian trail, what we now call “The Airline” (Route 9), from the area of Brewer to Calais. I am not surprised at the Green Book listing in Robbinston 100 years later.”

Rock Steady

At the National Museum of African American History & Culture, you’ll find a boulder with the words “Rock Rest” (below) painted in white. It was once one of two placed at the colorful, flowered entrance of Hazel and Clayton Sinclair’s Kittery farmhouse. Here, from the 1940s through the 1970s, the Sinclairs welcomed African American vacationers. For two summers as a teen, Valerie Cunningham, founder of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail (PBHT), worked for the Sinclairs.

“I referred to them as aunt and uncle,” Cunningham says. “It was a very small operation. The reason they didn’t advertise [in the Green Book] was because their clientele found out by word of mouth.” But they did have their own copy, which was found during restoration efforts when PBHT was entrusted by Clayton Sinclair Jr. to “preserve the memorabilia” in the home and find the right buyer to “protect the historic landmark.” The right buyer did come along and restored the nineteenth-century cape along with Clayton Sinclair’s additions. Today, much of the memorabilia can be found at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.

Maine’s summers weren’t the only draw for guests of Rock Rest. “[Hazel’s] cooking was part of the attraction,” says Cunningham. “During the day, if the weather was nice enough, guests would be gone. They’d be tourists, but they had their breakfast and dinner meals at Rock Rest. They couldn’t just walk into any place. The smaller cafes and soda fountain shops—they usually weren’t a problem. It was the more formal, upscale places.”

According to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission’s 2007 National Register of Historic Places’ nomination of Rock Rest, “Much of this discrimination was hush-hush, but one blatant incident made the newspapers in 1962…”

Golden Globe-winning actress Claudia McNeil was starring in the Kennebunkport Playhouse’s production of Raisin in the Sun (she’d already starred in the Broadway and Hollywood productions). According to an article in Connecticut’s Bridgeport Telegram, Robert Currier, owner of the playhouse, was told by seven local hotels that they would not accommodate McNeil. The nomination continues, “After the initial report, one innkeeper wrote a letter to the editor in which he pridefully proclaimed his prejudicial intent not to provide rooms for African Americans. After several further news articles, the State Attorney General’s office investigated the event, but later declined to pursue court action, stating that the state’s anti-discrimination laws had not been breached!”

As for the film itself, Cunningham says, “It was okay, but it gave the impression that the [Green Book locations] were all joints…It perpetuates some of the mythology of who black people are. There’s always been a middle class of black people who were and are educated and middle class. It’s a matter of miseducation. One of the reasons we are still having problems today.

“I grew up here,” Cunningham says. “[Portsmouth] is my home town. I graduated in 1959. I had classmates say, ‘Well, we didn’t have any problems, did we, Valerie?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, you did not—because you didn’t have to think about it.’”

Legacies

Of the Portland locations listed throughout the Green Book’s publication, two others still stand. Steps from Portland’s St. Lawrence Arts theater, on the corner of Munjoy Street, is 84 Congress Street., listed as being owned by Mrs. E.D. Richey in the Green Book. According to the tax assessor’s office, the home was built in 1920. In East Bayside at 38 Smith Street, an 1840 three-unit building belonged to a Mrs. C. Harris. And today, where Mrs. Martin’s home at 79 Oxford Street once stood, exists the Oxford Street Shelter.

“[The film The Green Book] introduced a lot of people to a subject matter that a lot of people didn’t know existed,” says Pamela Cummings, director of the restoration committee at the Abyssinian Meeting House. “We knew that segregation existed, but many didn’t know to what extent. It’s a learning tool from our past that we should use to avoid the same thing happening now or in the future.”

Green writes in the introduction of his 1949 edition, “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.” The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and the last edition of the Green Book was published in 1967. It contained 100 pages spanning from the 50 states to Africa, Europe, and South America.