The book was titled “Simms’ Blue Book,” but its color was a faded blue and its cover was pockmarked with stains.
It looked perfect when I saw it on the auction-house website, and just looking at the title, I knew that I wanted it. It was a clean blue book with faux gold lettering and a faux gold band around the perimeter, and it had some age on it. Googling, I learned that the original was published in 1923 and a reprint was done in 1977.
As soon as I got to the auction house, I searched through boxes of papers, photos and other ephemera for the book. I finally found it in a small box all its own. I lifted it carefully and opened its fragile pages.
Its full title was “Simms’ Blue Book and National Negro Business and Professional Directory,” with a publication date of January 1923. I had in my hand an original copy of the book by James N. Simms of Chicago.
I found a photograph of Simms near the front, along with an explanation of “the great need” that drove him to compile and publish such a book, which took him six months to produce.
“It is of great importance to any race to know what the individual members of its race is doing, where located, what successes they are making and the facts and circumstances that contribute to their successes and direct means of communicating with them,” he wrote.
“Another reason for publishing these biographical sketches in connection with this directory is that, in a book for general public use, as this one is intended to be, thousands of people will see and read the sketches of the lives of these persons, but very few people have access to them.”
Simms noted that a second thicker book would be published in 1924 and urged “legitimate” businesspeople to write to him.
James Nelson Simms was an attorney, publisher and inventor who lived in Chicago but was born in Port Royal, KY, according to the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia. The date of his birth is not clear, according to the encyclopedia: The 1870 census showed him as a 1-year-old, while his World War I draft registration listed his birth year as 1872.
He graduated from the State Colored Baptist University in Louisville, KY, in 1886 and studied at Wesleyan University in Delaware, OH. Catalogs for Oberlin College in Ohio for the 1881-1882 and 1886-1887 school years listed him as a student in the Department of Preparatory Instruction. He earned a law degree from the University of Indianapolis in 1897, according to the encyclopedia.
By 1900, he was living in Chicago where he was a member of the National Negro Bar Association. Simms continued to practice law into the 1930s and 1940s. There appears to be no information on his death, according to the encyclopedia.
Simms was a defense attorney who wrote political-opinion pieces for the Broad Ax, a black newspaper in Chicago. A Blue Book for the state of Illinois for the year 1923 showed him placing third in a primary race as a Republican for the State Senate in 1922.
As an inventor, he was granted a patent in 1917 for a design for an ornamental clock case featuring the bust of Booker T. Washington with inscriptions noting his accomplishments. He also was granted a patent in 1924 for a “heat-insulated warming chamber” for keeping food warm.
Simms’ 305-page book contains photos and short biographies about professional black people and their businesses, along with phone numbers and addresses, arranged by cities and states. There are longer bios of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
It also lists the names – and in some cases, phone numbers and addresses – of people without a profession or business, along with ads from various black businesses, including the Chicago Defender newspaper, Oscar Micheaux Film Corporation and Keystone National Detective Agency, which billed itself as the “pioneer and only Colored Licensed and Bonded Detective Agency in the World.”
The book is a smorgasbord of African American history, showing vibrant communities with banks, drug stores, theaters, hotels, grocery stores, real estate and insurance companies, dentists, churches, ice cream manufacturers, milliners, undertakers and more.
One of the things I found interesting was the number of black physicians listed, even in the smallest of towns. In my home state of Georgia, 35 physicians were listed in Atlanta. In my hometown of Macon, eight were listed, along with two banks (Liberty Savings & Real Estate Corp. and Middle Georgia Savings & Insurance Co.). At least one physician was listed in many of the small towns of Georgia.
In fact, in 1905, Georgia had 65 doctors, according to a 2016 article in the Atlantic quoting the book “The Way it was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia” by Donald Lee Grant. Black doctors go way back in the state, to the 19th century with the first one setting up office in Athens, according to Grant’s 2001 book.
The largest entries in Simms’ book are for such major metropolitan cities as New York, Chicago and Washington, DC.
Simms envisioned the book as a guide, to be “kept in a convenient place where any one can see and use it.”
