For Black travelers in the time of Jim Crow, segregation and discrimination meant the quintessential American road trip was far from simple — especially across the wide open spaces of the West.
“There's the fear. There's the violence,” said professor Christine Cooper-Rampato, who leads students at a Utah State University humanities lab researching the history of Black travel in Utah. “People have talked about carrying a pee bucket right in their car, because of fear of stopping at a rest stop. Carrying extra gas cans in their car, because what if they turn up at a gas station where they're not going to be served?”
Many Black travelers relied on guides that marked establishments as safe and welcoming for African American guests. The most famous was the Negro Motorist Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1967. Cooper-Rampato’s team also found Utah hotels and shops listed in similar books, such as the Go Guide to Pleasant Motoring and The Bronze American.
The guides featured Black-owned businesses catering to African American travelers on their journeys through Utah, Cooper-Rampato said, along with Asian restaurants, Japanese-owned auto mechanics and a Jewish grocery store in Ogden that served Black travelers.
“That was actually an interesting thing that we hadn't expected,” she said. “How non-dominant groups of people, in a sense, banded together or helped one another.”
But the guidebooks didn’t have much to offer beyond the Wasatch Front. Eden Marroquin, a USU student and researcher at Cooper-Rampato’s lab, said it was slim pickings beyond Salt Lake City.
“I remember reading accounts of people preparing, having to sleep in their cars overnight, particularly in southern Utah, just because the distance between places where Black people had accommodations was long and vast.”
That’s why it was a big deal in 1957 when the Green Book added the lodge at Zion National Park to its list of approved hotels.
For Black travelers who wanted to see the famed red rock towers, the lodge was one of just two safe refuges the 1957 book suggested in southwest Utah. The other was the Cedar Crest Lodge Motel in Cedar City, which has since been demolished.
Zion has worked to gather historical records, letters and photographs in recent years, said the park’s education supervisor, Jorge Hernandez, to preserve the history and help today’s millions of annual visitors understand it.
“It's really important to be able to share that story,” Hernandez said, “understanding not only the challenges, but the resilience and the progress that we continue to do, so every American can visit their national parks and enjoy their public lands.”
Zion Lodge was first built in 1925, managed by a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, which also sold visitors packages to travel here. People could drive right up to the main lobby, its entrance flanked by four sandstone columns that held up a large second-story dining patio.
In the lodge’s early days, however, some customers weren’t welcome. Zion’s oral history collection features an account of the lodge concessionaire prohibiting Black visitors from eating there in the 1920s.
“They were only allowed in if they were the chauffeurs for the people who were staying at the lodge,” said Paige Hoskins, Zion’s museum curator. “And if they did come in, they would eat separately.”
Other national parks had segregated restrooms and cabins into the 1930s and 40s. But in 1945, the federal government issued a directive to end racial discrimination at park accommodations nationwide.
In the following years, the National Park Service tried to spread the word about the change, posting notices in prominent Black publications that invited people to give the parks a try. A 1950 notice in the travel section of Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper relayed a message from the federal government that “all national park service areas are open to all citizens.”
“That's the first effort to take this rule that was published in ‘45 and get it out to the public,” Hoskins said.
Another notice in the Afro-American was published in 1956 — the year before Zion’s Green Book listing — with the headline “Federal parks open for all.” It included a quote from the park service’s concessionaire confirming that all facilities nationwide are open to everyone, regardless of race, and welcoming visitors’ feedback if they encountered any issues.
Some travelers had already put that offer to the test.
In 1948, Adoph Hodge, a Black teacher and tour operator from New York, led more than two dozen sightseers to parks across the West, including Zion, Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks in southern Utah. Afterward, Hodge wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Interior saying they received a warm welcome from park staff.
The trip made the group “proud to be of the American citizenry,” Hoskins said, quoting Hodge’s letter.
While staff may have been welcoming, other oral history accounts from that era chronicled white visitors at Utah’s parks who were less so and used racist language when talking around Black families, said Jada Yolich, a researcher who led a 2023 project with the Greening Youth Foundation to catalog Zion’s history of Black travel.
A lot of Zion’s African American visitors at this time came from the East Coast, Yolich said. They were often more affluent, college-educated and prominent leaders and business owners in their communities, she said. Many brought their children.
“A lot of families were going because they felt that it afforded them a lot of privacy that they weren't getting in other forms of leisure,” Yolich said. “So, there was a really big appeal for a lot of folks and families, in particular.”
Black newspaper records from that time indicate there was a trend of people traveling to California’s national parks on their honeymoon, so some may have stopped at Utah’s parks on the way.
Beyond relaxation, Yolich said many of Zion’s early Black visitors endured the arduous journey out West because they sought something more spiritual. In a time when they may have been excluded from other aspects of the American dream, they wanted to see themselves in these iconic landscapes.
“In doing this travel and reclaiming leisure in a way that worked for African Americans,” she said, “it made them feel more reflected in the fabric of America.”
There are still barriers today, though. African Americans made up just 1% of national park visitors nationwide in 2018, according to data from the park service. Other reports have put the number between 2% and 6%.
“The desegregation of outdoor recreation is a really multifaceted, decades-long fight in this country,” said Jocelyn Imani, senior director of Black history and culture with the conservation group Trust for Public Land.
There’s legal access to public land. And then there’s the sense of where Black Americans feel like they can safely go.
Imani, a former park ranger, experienced this firsthand on a road trip from the East Coast to her job at Grand Canyon National Park in 2016. On the way, she got lost during a storm in a rural part of southern Illinois without cell phone service. If that had happened during Jim Crow, she said, it may have ended very differently for her.
“I was scared like I had never felt fear before,” Imani said. “I remember that was the first time I understood the Green Book and the purpose of the Green Book.”
That highlights one barrier that can keep some African Americans from visiting national parks today, she said. Some might not view remote, rural areas as safe because of intergenerational trauma linked to acts of racist violence their ancestors experienced in similar environments.
For others, cultural ideas about outdoor recreation or the cost of gear may keep them away. But Imani has seen that change as younger generations of Black Americans lead their own groups, such as Outdoor Afro, to get outside together.
“Then we're coming back to the city and telling our friends from the city how great it was and showing pictures,” Imani said. “So, we're seeing more and more of that happen.”
The parks are also making efforts to reach out. The Every Kid Outdoors program offers fourth graders and their families free admission to any national park site. The Concrete to Canyons program at Zion brings fifth graders from Las Vegas and Mesquite, Nevada, to the park for camping trips.
The more Black kids are exposed to the outdoors, Imani said, the more they may grow up to take on leadership roles in parks or outdoor recreation — lowering the barriers for the next generation.
“That gives me hope,” Imani said. “I think by making sure that African Americans have access, and other ethnic groups have access, we're ultimately making space where everybody feels more safe, more comfortable.”
Highlighting the long history of Black presence at the parks can be an important step toward that goal. At the same time, the National Park Service has come under fire for removing some information about the history of slavery and civil rights from its sites at the order of the Trump administration.
When it comes to the history of Black travel in Utah, there are still plenty of unknowns.
The next steps for the USU research team will be to learn more, such as whether or not the concessionaire buses that carried travelers to Zion were segregated. They also want to gather oral histories from Black Americans who traveled to Utah’s national parks before 1970. The team has presented some of their findings at traveling museum displays in partnership with the Sema Hadithi Foundation and hopes to turn it into a permanent exhibit.
Utah history is typically told through a single lens — that of Mormon pioneers, said researcher Marroquin. Understanding the journey of Black travelers could widen the lens.
“I feel like people get a little bit uncomfortable when we're talking about a history in Utah that isn't directly tied to the Church,” Marroquin said. “You can't really have a full picture of Utah, or of anywhere really, if you're not incorporating other histories that are just as important.”
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
