murray’s overall wearing dude ranch

I talked a bit about Murray’s Dude Ranch, in Victorville, CA early on in the blog’s history, when I was posting about Herb Jeffries, the singing cowboy and The Bronze Buckaroo. Many of the Jeffries films, including BB were shot at Murray’s, a dude ranch in the desert about an hour from Los Angeles that catered to an African American clientele, beginning way back in the early part of the 20th century.   

Earlier, I had linked a short history by the National Park Service, because there were very few artifacts of or histories about Murray’s to refer to, and it only exists, like many of the sites from the Green Book, primarily in people’s memories and a few newsclippings here and there. So I was pretty excited to obtain this postcard, which I believe to be original, that depicts Murray’s as the “Overall Wearing Dude Ranch” in Victorville, CA.  This image is just completely amazing, and the level of detail and the discreet visibility of the structures make it the clearest image I have every come across of this site.

There’s no date or writing on the back, but its the only thing like it I’ve ever seen, and I’m guessing from the way the ranch is built out that it dates from  before WWII.  With it, and the clips from Bronze Buckaroo, supplemented by the archival clips,  I potentially might be able to reconstruct a site plan or at least a schematic.  Because Murray’s heydey dates from from the 1920s, as opposed to most of the other sites I’m looking at that date from the 1950s, finding living eye-witnesses is much harder, but I suspect that in some of the papers and oral histories of west coast jazz musicians that are held in collections around Los Angeles, I might find a mention of Murray’s. That, along with the history of the Murray’s themselves, might be enough to piece together a serviceable history of this extraordinary lost place.

Here is the listing for Murray’s in the Green Book (1949) that is online and mentioned in the Slate.com piece. I will try to dig up the ad from Travelguide and post as well.

“mapping the green book” on Slate.com

Very grateful for and overwhelmed by the totally unexpected notice on Slate.com today, and particularly for the many excellent comments, tweets, email messages, shares and new Followers this bit of press has garnered for MGB. I know it will take a few days for me to get back to everyone who asked a question or suggested a resource, but I hope to do it soon. So if you’re coming for the first time, thanks very much!

mapping the green book in new orleans

The MGB project is officially re-igniting, inspired by the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans. This years’ AHA meeting in NOLA is particularly tantalizing for the MGB project, as New Orleans was the site of the Plessy v Ferguson case that initiated the segregation of travel that defined the landscape of The Green Book. A number of intriguing panels are on the schedule and I’ll be posting on a few sessions related to race, landscape and the Jim Crow era from the conference as I am able. With some luck I may be able to visit a few of the sites in New Orleans as well, and provide a bit of background about the city’s singular place in the cultural history of race and space.

Below, a completely unrelated photo of the gorgeous Beckham’s Book Shop in the French Quarter. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

the ideal scrapbook from richmond, va, c.1947

During my not entirely planned hiatus from this project, I’ve been quietly collecting objects and artifacts. One of them, my favorite, perhaps my most treasured and rich acquisition so far, is sitting in front of me on my dining room table. I’ve been looking at it for a couple of months now, and I am a little afraid of it, the way you might be afraid of a piece of jewelry that is too nice to wear on your quotidian rounds.

It’s a scrapbook, the way that people used to make scrapbooks—with care and attention to each page and its composition. And from what I can tell, it was made by an African American schoolteacher from Richmond, VA, a woman who traveled around the U.S. with a group of fellow teachers in about 1947.  It appears from some of the articles pasted into its very fragile pages, that she was traveling with a group known as the “Pals Club”, who had taken a month-long trip to the West and the Grand Canyon. If the barriers to an undertaking like this were formidable, they were not alone in tackling them. Schoolteachers, and you could look to Mary McLeod Bethune among  many others,  were among the first and most ambitious African American tourists and travelers after World War II. It’s also a spatial document, a kind of map of its own that describes a particular itinerary, a set of interests, a navigation through segregation or in spite of it, toward the kinds of sights that lots of people wanted to see after the war was finally over—Mission Delores, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans.

The pages are filled with brochures, cards, paper souvenirs, maps, postcards and other ephemera from hotels, churches, tourist sites, restaurants, and cab services, among others. It is the kind object you really want to find, but never do. When you study cultural history in the post-mass-production era, you have this problem of material, because so much of what you look at—your evidence, whatever it might be—has been mass produced and distributed in a way that makes it impossible to know what people might have thought about it. Contrast this with my friends who study 18th century history who can track down who published a book and, through the publisher’s records, determine who ordered it, and when. How would you do that with a postcard? or a travel guide?

So this scrapbook is kind of the holy grail for a 20thc historian of vernacular, or everyday, history: a highly personal, specific and datable commentary on mass-produced material. On the cover, as if to make sure I get it, there is nothing but three words: “An Ideal Scrap Book.”  But it is also part of someone’s life, someone who may or may not be alive today, and who might have family and friends. So, this is both exciting because they could be found and interviewed, and completely intimidating because this is an intimate part of someone’s life that requests both sensitivity and humility.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll start tracking down the woman who made this scrapbook. I’ll find out her name, and where she taught—there weren’t very many schools in Richmond that taught and employed African American teachers—where she lived and who the Pals Club was and where else they might have traveled. I’ll might make a little map of all the places she and the Pal’s Club visited as documented by the scrapbook. And at some point, I’ll give it away, to the NMAAHC, if they want it for their collections, or to a local museum in Richmond, or even back to the family, because it shouldn’t stay here, it should be seen.

jack lauderdale + the la dale motel

7.20.12 | at desk

A few weeks back, when I was out at the NEH Institute, I went on a driving tour of Central Avenue in Los Angeles with Dell Upton. If you’ve never been on a tour with a couple of architectural historians, it basically consists of driving around for multiple hours without stopping while clutching various lists of addresses in hand. It’s a very particular kind of pleasure. And so it was for us. Armed with our complementary lists of sites, a GPS and some cameras, we killed a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon driving around the historically African American section of LA—Central, Jefferson, Adams.  I got to see some of the major LA hotel sites from the travel guides from my list, including the Dunbar (Sommerville) Hotel, the Paul Williams-designed YMCA, the Lincoln Hotel and a few others. On Dell’s music-focused list, we saw the homes of Bill Bojangles (also Paul Williams), Eric Dolphy, and Hampton Hawes. I even got a bonus drive by of Marvin Gay’s house. I saw more things than I could list here, but most of all I got to see how the neighborhoods were  organized, the industrial areas that cut them off from and shaped their growth, and the way in which they’ve continued to evolve as more hispanic families have moved in. Can’t get that from a book. Or a map.

But these were the success. Many of the sites on my list were no longer there, especially the lesser known clubs and hotels. Toward the end of the day, we drove down Jefferson Avenue  looking for the La Dale Motel. I didn’t have much expectation of finding it.  The La Dale was one of two or three motels with the same name at different addresses listed in the guides from the late 1950s. They weren’t very fancy and didn’t have any associations that might have caused them to be retained that I knew of. But low and behold, there it was:

Pretty much completely intact.

I was pretty excited.

Later Dell did some digging and it turned out the La Dale Motels and Hotels were the business venture of one Jack Lauderdale.  Lauderdale owned Downbeat Record Store in the late 1940s and a label called Swing Time in the 1950s. Lauderdale and Swing Time, along with John Dolphin’s legendary shop, Dolphin Records, had been central pillars in the jazz and r+b scene in LA in the 1950s. It was a great little find that tied the travel and hotel sites of my list with  music-related sites on Dell’s list. So the La Dale was much more than a little motel in the landscape, it was part of the whole fabric of the music scene in 50s Los Angeles that would influence the evolution of post-war jazz (and art, I might argue) all over the world.

For further reading, here are the two posts that Dell found about Lauderdale and Swing Time Records.

making the case

6.30.12 | ucla

Below I’ve posted a prototype of the kind of mapping exercises I’ve been working on while at the NEH Summer Seminar at UCLA for the last two weeks—in part because I felt like I needed to show that I am actually making things, but also to illustrate the challenges of doing this kind of project. This is what building an argument is like in this medium.

So the video below is a quick snapshot of lodging, food and auto services listed in the Green Book and other guides in California from about 1939 to about 1960. With a Legend, more complete data, and a few tweaks so that you could see it a little better, it would be a simple way to where and when these businesses developed.  But given that it took me the better part of a very focused day to make even this clumsy version, it demonstrates the importance of thinking through your argument before you sit down to create a visualization. Other than a snapshot of how/where travel sites are appearing, what kinds of questions does this exercise satisfy?

The answer is, Not Many. It does, if you look very closely, raise some questions. Unsurprisingly if you know anything about Los Angeles, most of the businesses cluster around Central,and as time moves forward you can see them moving south down the spine of the avenue. There is also a suggestion of a kind of zoning that takes place over time. Some parts of the central district seem to split off and attract clusters of like business—garages, gas stations, auto services—for example.  And, also unsurprisingly,  its clear that state-wide, the sites are attaching along main highways and at the border crossings of Nevada and Mexico. But there are wide swaths of the state where there just isn’t much. Is that because everything was open? in other words, are there no places listed in the guides for these areas because it was generally known that these areas didn’t discriminate? I would say no. Anecdotally, and from the personal accounts I’ve read, people didn’t take chances if they didn’t know a place.  But that’s an open question too.

After a pretty intensive week of trying to build out the maps in various forms and on various platforms, I realize I need to work smarter. I think there’s a kind of balance that has to be struck between waiting to see what the visualizations might show us and building them with a certain intention or thought that they might support a pre-existing idea. There’s always some kind of hypotheses driving the process of making these maps, but I also want to leave it open to see what the maps might show us, otherwise there isn’t much point.

I’ve only got one or two working days left here and quite a bit to pull together before I present on Tuesday morning, so I will want to be strategic about the kind of visualizations I try to build.   How can I build something that is actually a form of research in and of itself, and not just a representation of research I’ve already done?

Photo by Peter Leonard

19 June 2012 | Young Research Library, UCLA

For the next two+ weeks, I’ll be out in Los Angeles, attending the NEH Seminar on Digital Cultural Mapping, hosted by Diane Favro, Chris Johansen and Tod Presner. We’ll be in class every day, learning about DH (Digital Humanities) projects and tools and working on our own projects. I’ll be posting intermittently from the seminar on a variety of topics from developing robust geo-spatial arguments, pressuring the academic world to accept DH projects for tenure, sustainability and digital projects, using DH in the classroom, among other topics.

In honor of moving into the next phase of the Mapping the Green Book project, I’ve opened up a Twitter Feed @GreenBookMaps so that I can better keep track of my colleagues in DH around the globe.

re:contact

Although I was never expecting a deluge of email when I put my address on the contact page, I did think I might get…one, maybe two.  And when I didn’t I finally went and checked and low and behold, I had put the wrong address in the mailto: code.

In other words, if you tried to reach me and got a bounce back, I fixed it. So try again!