https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2025.12.23
In the age of racial inequality, African American tourist guides played a crucial role in promoting Black travel and tourism. During the Jim Crow era, when segregation and discrimination were rampant, African American tourist guides were especially important. They helped African American travelers navigate the complex system of racial restrictions and avoid dangerous areas. These guides played a key role as they provided information about safe places to travel, accommodations that welcomed Black visitors, and businesses that treated Black customers fairly.
The purpose of this article is to show the impact and role that tourist guidebooks served Black tourists travelling to the state of Montana during the period of racial persecution when color line was drawn upon the society. The study analyses listings of accommodation facilities and hotels in tourist guides against the provisions of local and state laws defining the principles of segregation in force over time. Furthermore, it highlights how Black Americans developed alternative routes and travel plans to live within a racist and segregated nation. This resource study is informed by archival records as well as archival and museum collections. The study also draws from archival material and is enriched by newspaper accounts.
The conducted research may contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of racism in the north-west of the USA in the area of tourism and become the cornerstone for mapping of places where racial prejudice existed in the state of Montana. This, in turn, will allow in the long run to identify potential “sundown towns” or “gray towns” — cities or districts where racial and ethnic segregation was practiced through the institutional use of restrictions on civil rights, discriminatory local laws, intimidation and violence. Hostility towards non-white clientele was very common during the Jim Crow era in almost all aspects of society. Hostility also affected tourists making short and transcontinental trips. As Ćwikła states it was this “hostility” — etymologically co-inscribed with “hospitality” (in French and English: hostilité/hostility — hospitalité/hospitality — together with considerations regarding the antinomy of the threshold and open hands inherent in hospitality, that made Derrida coin the term “hostpitalité/s” – hostpitality.
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