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Mishawaka · The Negro Motorist Green Book · 1940–1949
The Black traveler's guide to America never found a Mishawaka business it could list. This build's Food fragment ran the test whole, reading the editions first-hand: in the Negro Motorist Green Book for 1940, for 1947 and for 1949, Mishawaka's page is blank entire — no restaurant, no tourist home, no tavern, no service station, no lodging of any kind; the city's name occurs nowhere in the books. The finding is printed with the guide's own limits, as the other cities' entries print them: the Green Book listed businesses that welcomed Black travelers and confirmed them for its pages, and an unlisted town is evidence about the welcome, not proof that no Black traveler ever found a room. The contrast stands four miles west: South Bend's whole entry in the same editions is a single restaurant, and no lodging there either — the color line in lodging ran the length of the valley, and Mishawaka's blank page is its complete local measure. The later editions, 1950 through the guide's end in 1966–67, were not swept for this city in these passes; the New York Public Library's Green Book dataset and the later editions' full texts are the settling sources, and the gap stands open in the Food fragment's ledger as in this one.
Sources:
- The Negro Motorist Green Book, editions of 1940, 1947 and 1949, read first-hand — Mishawaka unlisted in all three; dug whole in this build's Food fragment, whose note carries the editions and the method.
- South Bend's Hotels & Motels — the same editions' South Bend entry: one restaurant, no lodging, in 1940 and 1949.