The Negro Main Street project explores how city business directories aimed at the African American market were used to define and create black urban spaces. African American business directories reflected the establishment of black business districts and, more broadly, the black communities (i.e. Negro Main Streets) that existed throughout the U.S.’s Jim Crow era.
Negro Main Street is a digital humanities project that at its core, it consists of the development of a database of over 200 black business directories from 60 cities, spanning from 1835 to 1972. Currently, these directories reside in a number of spaces: some have been digitized and reside on sites like archive.org, others have been digitized by individual libraries and historical societies. Still others are in microform format, scattered across university and public libraries. While hard copies exist of some directories, many of them are in difficult to access special collections.
Like projects focusing on rediscovered aspects of African American print life such as the Negro Traveler’s Green Book, the Negro Main Street project takes something as quotidian as a local business directory as the building block to reimagine African American urban life in Jim Crow America, and especially during the Great Migration era.
The Negro Main Street has an initial goal to make these directories accessible to a broader public through the development of a database of directories. The current database here provides basic information on the directories including the physically location of each directory (if available); and, a link to any current digital location.