Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545782
gathering in ways that prefigured today's conferences and conventions. In 1895, Black physicians barred from the American Medical Association founded the National Medical Association. In 1909, the NAACP convened its first National Negro Conference in New York City. In 1925, twelve Black attorneys excluded from the American Bar Association founded the National Bar Association in Des Moines, Iowa. Today, an estimated 3,500 African American organizations host annual national and regional conferences, drawing mil lions nationwide. Including NABHOOD which reports more than 400 African Americanowned hotels across 35 states, Canada, and internationally — a growing ownership stake in the industry that once turned them away at the door. THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE PORTERS WHO CARRIED THE WORD In the early twentieth century, Jim Crow laws and the con stant headlines of lynchings and mob violence prompted a reported 6,000,000 Black Americans to venture from their homes in the rural South to relocate to less hostile environ ments in Midwestern, Northern, and far Western states. Along with any physical belongings they could carry, they brought a rich culture, unique music, a tradition of flavorful food, and a commitment to being, doing, and having better, that is thor oughly woven into the landscape of every part of this nation. At the center of this movement's mechanics stood the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph and granted their AFL charter in 1937. The Pullman Porters carried the Chicago Defender into the Deep South — slipping copies into communities where its celebra tion of northern opportunity was considered incendiary, seeding train schedules, job listings, and the coordinates of a better life. The A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood honors this history, standing where a people organized liberation from inside the machinery of their exclusion. INVENTORS IN MOTION: BLACK INNOVATION AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRAVEL African American inventors made modern travel itself possible. In Greenfield, Ohio, Charles Richard Patterson — born into enslavement in Virginia in 1833 — founded C. R. Patterson and Sons, which produced the Patterson Greenfield automobile in 1915: the only African American owned automobile company in U.S. history. Charles and his son Frederick were inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2021. In Cleveland, Ohio, Garrett Morgan — child of two formerly enslaved people — received a 1923 patent for the threeposition traffic signal, creating the modern yellow light governing the movement of billions worldwide; his orig inal is preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Frederick McKinley Jones invented the first automatic refrigeration system for longhaul trucks in the late 1930s, later adapted for trains, ships, and aircraft — holding more than 60 patents and becoming the first African American posthumously awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991. THE GREEN BOOK SPAWNS A NEW DAY IN TRAVEL In 1936, Harlem postal worker Victor Hugo Green pub lished The Negro Motorist Green Book — fifteen pages cov ering safe establishments in New York, expanding nationally within a year, eventually selling two million copies annually through Esso stations. As historian Calvin Ramsey notes, it was both a lifesaving guide and a book of commerce, con necting Blackowned businesses and Blackowned family houses opening their doors as Tourist Homes nationwide long before Air BnB. Facing extreme disenfranchisement traveling while Black, B M & T ••• July/August 2026 ••• www.blackmeetingsandtourism.com 29 BA 250 Special Edition photo credit: Ghost DC Delegates to the 54th annual convention of ex-slaves in 1916 held in Washington DC.