The Green Book test: Mishawaka is not in the book

1940 — 1949 · three editions read first-hand

The test and the method: The Green Book's test, as run for the cities before this one, reads the guide's own pages for the city's name — the Negro Motorist Green Book, the travel guide Black motorists carried through the segregation decades, listing the hotels, tourist homes, restaurants, and services known to receive them. Three editions were read first-hand for this entry: 1940 and 1949 in their full texts, and 1947 in the Smithsonian's transcription of the National Museum of African American History and Culture's copy.

The result, at full size: Mishawaka is not in the book. The word occurs nowhere in the 1949 edition's full text; the 1940 edition's Indiana pages list Anderson, Fort Wayne, French Lick, Gary, Michigan City, Muncie, New Albany, and South Bend, and Mishawaka is not among them; the 1947 transcription's Indiana listings — Anderson, Angola, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, West Baden — likewise carry no Mishawaka. The contrast with the city four miles west is the measure of the finding: in 1949 South Bend's whole entry is a single line under Restaurants — Smokes, 432 South Chapin Street — one restaurant and no lodging of any kind. A traveler following the guide through St. Joseph County was directed to eat in South Bend and to find no listed stop at all in Mishawaka: no restaurant, no tourist home, no tavern, no service station, in any edition checked. The guide's own introduction states the limit of the evidence, and it is printed with the finding, as the earlier cities' entries print it: the book listed what its agents reported, and "there are thousands of first class business places that we don't know about and can't list, which would be glad to serve the traveler." Absence from the book is not proof that no Mishawaka house would serve a Black traveler; it is proof the guide's network never recorded one, across a decade of editions, in a city of more than thirty thousand. The later editions, into the 1950s and 1960s, stand named in this section's note as the update pass's sweep.

Sources:

1. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1949 (Victor H. Green & Co.), full text read first-hand (archive.org, the Henry Ford copy) — the Indiana pages: Indianapolis, Jeffersonville, Marion, Kokomo, Lafayette, Michigan City, Muncie, South Bend ("Smokes — 432 S. Chapin St."), Terre Haute, West Baden Springs, Evansville; the name Mishawaka occurring nowhere in the book; the introduction's own caveat on unlisted places.
2. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1940, full text (archive.org) — the Indiana listings: Anderson, Fort Wayne, French Lick, Gary, Michigan City, Muncie, New Albany, South Bend; no Mishawaka.
3. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1947, Smithsonian Transcription Center (NMAAHC copy) — the Indiana listings: Anderson, Angola, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, West Baden; no Mishawaka.
4. Food section of the South Bend history and the South Bend record — the same test run there: one restaurant, no lodging, in both the 1940 and 1949 editions.