The Color Line at the Desk

1901 – the Green Book editions of 1940 and 1949

Lead: Who could register at a South Bend hotel is part of the lodging record, and the record documents it at two points. The first is the Oliver Hotel's desk in the first years of the century. The University of Michigan's published account of Branch Rickey's own oft-told story dates the scene 1901: the visiting Wesleyan baseball team, in town to play Notre Dame, had reserved rooms at the Oliver, and at check-in every player was accepted except one — Charles Thomas, the team's star catcher, refused by the clerk because he was African American. Rickey, the team's coach, negotiated with the clerk until Thomas was allowed up to the room to wait. Rickey carried the scene for the rest of his life; as the general manager who signed Jackie Robinson in 1945, he told it as a fixed point in his own road to that signing. The episode is printed here as the Michigan account gives it, date and all; the wider arc of Black South Bend is told in the Black History account of this record, and this entry keeps to the desk.

The second point is a directory's evidence. The Negro Motorist Green Book — the guide Black travelers carried through the Jim Crow decades, read first-hand for this section in its 1940 and 1949 editions — lists exactly one South Bend establishment in 1940: a restaurant, Smoke's Place, at 492 Chapin Street. The 1949 edition lists it again as Smokes, at 432 South Chapin Street; the two addresses stand as their editions print them. No South Bend hotel, motel, or tourist home appears in either edition reached. The contrast with the companion record is the sharpest statement of the fact: Fort Wayne's Green Book is a tourist-home record of five houses, printed in that city's account; South Bend's is a single restaurant. A Black traveler coming to South Bend in 1940 or 1949 held a guide that could feed him in this city and could not lodge him in it — and the absence, printed in the guide's own pages, is the documentation.

Sources:

1. University of Michigan News Service, "Branch Rickey: A Matter of Fairness" (2013), carried by The Clio (the Oliver Hotel refusal, dated 1901 in the account).
2. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1940 edition (Smoke's Place, restaurant, 492 Chapin Street), read first-hand.
3. The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1949 edition (Smokes, 432 South Chapin Street), read first-hand.
4. The Hotels & Motels account of the Fort Wayne record (the five tourist homes of the 1955 edition, for the contrast).