LANSING, Mich. — The recent movie "Green Book" has drawn a lot of attention to a series of travel guides that were published between 1936 and 1966.
The book listed businesses where African Americans were welcomed and could avoid various kinds of mistreatment and humiliation.
A new exhibit at MSU Libraries is digging deeper into that history, offering visitors an opportunity to see a map of all 86 Detroit locations and 5 Lansing locations that are listed in nine editions of "The Negro Motorist Green Book."
Kathleen Weessies is in charge of the m at the library.
She sad, "I used historical maps to pinpoint their locations exactly because a lot of these places don't exist anymore, they're underneath Ford Field. We can figure out exactly where they were and how they clustered into neighborhoods and how well they represented the African American retail landscape in general."
The exhibit also presents a side-by-side comparison of before-and-after pictures of the businesses showing what they looked like between 50 and 80 years ago, and what they look like presently.
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