Editor’s note: This July, as Colorado Springs gears up for its 150th birthday on the 31st, The Gazette has prepared a series of articles on the history of our city. Check back for fascinating glimpses into the people and events that have shaped Colorado Springs.

The mid-20th century was a difficult time for Black citizens who wanted to pack their families into their automobiles and travel the American countryside. The shadow of Jim Crow — the term for a set of state or

local laws that legalized racial segregation — still hung over much of the country, and racial violence was not an uncommon occurrence. Pockets of racism known as “Sundown towns” — where Black people were banned after dark — dotted the American landscape. A Black person in an unfamiliar town, trying to fill their gas tank or grab a drink in a bar, could be arrested — or worse — simply because of their skin color.

“If you were Black and you went to certain places, you could get roughed up,” said Jamal Ratchford, a Colorado

College history professor who teaches courses on race and ethnicity. “You could be arrested. You could be killed.”

Weary of the racial discrimination Black people often faced when they ventured outside their neighborhoods, a New York postal carrier named Victor Hugo Green began collecting information on places where Black people could find safe places to sleep, eat, get a haircut, buy a drink or pump gas.

Green organized a list of these establishments into the Negro Motorist Green Book, which was first published in 1936 and ran annually — with publication suspended during World War II — until 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial segregation in the U.S.

Colorado was home to more than two dozen Green Book safe havens, according to a 1940 edition of the guide. Black travelers looking for a safe, friendly place to sleep could find one in Trinidad, Pueblo, La Junta, Greeley, Denver or Colorado Springs.

The Green Book addresses in Colorado Springs “were in parts of the city where a lot of Black neighborhoods were at the time,” said Candice Mcknight, a third-generation native who runs the African-american Historical and Genealogical Society of Colorado Springs and the city’s first Black History Museum. “So Black travelers would have felt safer and more welcome there.”

The three Colorado Springs addresses in the Green Book were listed as “tourist homes” — private residences that offered lodging at a time when the city had few Black-friendly hotels.

“Black people couldn’t stay at The Broadmoor,” Ratchford said. “They couldn’t stay at The Antlers. There were a lot of places that were just off-limits to us.”

A two-story home at 717 N. Corona St., owned by Mrs. Nicke Hamilton, is listed in the 1940 edition of the Green Book. Mcknight remembers it as a boarding house during her youth.

“A cousin of mine lived there for a while,” she said.

The Hamilton residence, north of East Willamette Avenue, was a few houses down from the home of legendary Cotton Club owner Fannie Mae Duncan. Duncan often housed musicians and entertainers in her large home at 615 N. Corona St.

Dr. I. Moore operated a four-bedroom tourist home at 738 Spruce St., according to the Green Book. A search of the 1940s and 1950s city directories did not find Moore’s name, but Mcknight said the occupant of the home would have almost certainly been Black in the 1940s.

Mrs. G. Roberts offered shelter to Black travelers at their home at 418 E. Cucharras St., according to the Green Book. The city directory shows Mamie and George Roberts lived at that address during the 1940s.

The Hamilton and Moore homes are occupied by families, but the land that once housed the Roberts’ Cucharras St. residence is now a vacant lot.

“That’s a shame,” Mcknight said. “So much history in that house. And now it’s gone.”

When Green died in 1960, his wife, Alma, took over as editor of the book. By then, what began as a small pamphlet had grown into a musthave guidebook for Black travelers, selling about 15,000 copies each year at the height of its popularity. Green did not live long enough to see the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the introduction in the 1948 edition of the Green Book suggests he foresaw a time when the book would be obsolete.

“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” the author wrote.

“That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”