RICHMOND — A rare artifact of African-American history on the West Coast that belonged to the descendant of a former slave has been digitized and is now online in searchable form for browsing or downloading.

The Official California Negro Directory and Classified Buyers Guide, a 1942-43 publication by New Age Publishing, contains residential and business listings for California, Oregon and Washington.

The 1942 directory includes ads for both black-owned businesses and white-owned businesses that accepted black trade, similar to “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a travel guide issued for more than 30 years to help African-Americans find hotels and restaurants that would accommodate them during a time of rigid segregation.

“It’s an implied message, a clue that they will welcome your business,” said Susan D. Anderson, interim chief curator of the African American Museum and Library branch of the Oakland Public Library. “It was one of the reasons these were done.”

The directory came from the estate of noted Richmond resident George Johnson.

Johnson was California’s oldest living resident and its last surviving veteran of World War I when he died in Richmond on Aug. 30, 2006, at age 112. According to family lore, “President Andrew Johnson’s son Herbert was George’s grandfather,” George Johnson’s nephew, Walter Points, said in a 2006 interview.

Johnson’s wife, Ida Dulany Johnson, had an office on Sacramento Street in Berkeley, where she solicited listings and sold ads for the directory in the Bay Area.

“It is so exciting that the 1942-43 directory has been digitized and is now available through the Internet Archive,” said Melinda McCrary, executive director of the Richmond Museum of History. “The story of the former owner, George Johnson, is quite meaningful. The directory itself is a significant historical resource, particularly because I find minority-owned businesses are often omitted from the common city directories such as those published by Polk.”

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based “nonprofit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies and music, as well as 310 billion archived web pages.”

The era captured in the directory is a pivotal time during World War II when work force demands opened defense industry employment opportunities that brought blacks to the West Coast, swelling the established population.

The publication provided an informational resource for a community still segregated from the mainstream. It also simultaneously boosted the growing struggle for equality, while taking a patriotic tone. “God Bless America The Land Of Freedom” is written across the top of the cover.

“Despite (blacks and whites) fighting a common war, segregation was very much alive during the 1940s,” McCrary said. “This directory serves as a testament to the African-American community and as a symbol of ‘unity of our people,'” a phrase the directory uses in its introduction.

The volume had been in the Johnson home unprotected for decades and was in fragile condition. Pieces of the cover and outside pages would flake away with each viewing.

It was McCrary, enthused about its potential as a research resource and its connection to Richmond, who put the process in motion that led to preserving the directory in digital form for a new generation.

She put out a call for ideas on social media and was put in contact with Jason Scott of the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive has specialized equipment designed to efficiently scan such items, but because of the directory’s fragile condition and unorthodox binding, Scott determined the staples would have to be removed and each page placed individually on a flatbed scanner.

Because of its rarity, Scott also decided to do high-resolution 1,200-DPI scans, adding to the duration of the digitization project. In all, it took some seven hours, but on Dec. 15 the directory went online at http://bit.ly/2BUuewj.

Directories marketed to the black community have a long history, said Anderson with the African American Museum and Library.

The branch archive includes “The Colored Business Directory of 1915,” a Bay Area publication likely timed for visitors to the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The directory was published by Charles Tilghman, an established printer and member of the area’s early African-American families, and is “is chock full of information,” Anderson said.

The branch also has its own copy of the 1942 directory, but overall, surviving books of this type are rare, Anderson said.

“There were plenty of publications, but it’s hard to come across them,” she said. “There are so few of these out there. It tells the story of what was going on at that time.”

ONLINE

The statewide 1942-43 directory was an expansion of directories published for the largely black Central Avenue business district in Los Angeles starting in 1938. The 1939 edition of that directory, also from the George Johnson estate, is online at https://archive.org/details/officialcentrala0000cent