The Red Book of Houston

 The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium of Social, Professional, Religious, Educational and Industrial Interests of Houston's Colored Population  intends to provide a look at Houston's Black community 50 years after emancipation. One thing the authors could not do is show this world on a map. This project intends to do just that and to reveal new insights into the community, whose lives extended much further than Third, Fourth, and Fifth wards.

Below is a map featuring the residences (pink circles), churches (green triangles), schools (orange squares), and businesses (purple diamonds) that are in The Red Book. By clicking on any of the dots, you can find more information and, if available, images from the book.

If you click on the magnifying glass in the upper left corner, you can search the data. You will need to click on the triangle and select what you want to search (schools, residences, churches, businesses), type in the name you are looking for. For example, if you select "residences" or "businesses" type in a person's last name.

For those who provided short biographies to The Red Book, we can get a sense of migration patterns into the city, mainly from Texas but also further afield. The blue of Louisiana and Georgia show the frequency of migration from those states.

While a few of the people appearing in The Red Book migrated from surrounding states, most came from other parts of Texas.

Using the biographies in The Red Book, the list of home businesses, the teacher's home address list, and the other names that populate the book, we created a database of people ranging from women who ran restaurants in their homes to the well-to-do of Black Houston. Click on any of the points below to learn more about each person. Information can include images, birth year, church affiliation, and other data that we gathered from The Red Book, the Houston city directory, and other resources. Red dots represent women and blue represent men.

Clubs and lodges were important to the social lives of some members of this community. The groups included men's groups like the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias, and women's groups like Sisters of the Mysterious Ten and the Heroines of Jericho. Based on the biographies appearing in The Red Book, we have identified the men and women who participated in these groups.

Based on the amount of text devoted to churches and notable pastors, the book's creators saw religion as incredibly important to the community. The churches fall across many parts of the city including Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards and the growing Heights.

The maps below show the geographic relationship between some of the churches, their pastors, and their congregations. This data comes from a subset of people's biographies that listed church affiliation.

The map below shows the large network of schools spanning across the city. Some lacked formal addresses, nestled in areas that had yet to be mapped.

Tying into the book's focus on advancement post-Emancipation, schools and teachers take center stage in The Red Book. The maps below highlight some of the geographic relationships between the teachers and their schools.

The Red Book contains a ten page directory of businesses organized by type, ranging from notaries to undertakers. Even outmoded occupations like "express and drayage," which is now termed logistics, are well represented. Some of the business owners worked out of their homes, running restaurants and markets. Others worked outside the home in business hubs along San Felipe Road and Travis Street, like the lawyer above.

To see business ownership by gender, slide the blue bar back and forth. Men are blue and women are red. Typically, women-led businesses included restaurants, groceries/markets, and lodging, referred to in The Red Book as furnished rooms.

The top five types of businesses are barbers, clothes cleaner and pressers, express and drayage, grocers, and restaurant owners. You can explore the different professions below and see their locations in the city, as well as the home address of the owners.

With the final map below, we wanted to point to the changes that occurred to The Red Book's community over time. More specifically, the map highlights how the highway/interstate system destroyed parts of these neighborhoods, splitting them into smaller areas, and creating barriers between the residents and other parts of the city like downtown. All the black dots represent addresses that no longer exist.

The maps above are just one way to showcase the data from The Red Book. If you would like to use the data for your own project, you can  download it .