Scope and Content Note
The Green-Driver Collection documents African-American middle class, business, and church life in the American South during the Jim Crow era. The bulk of the material was assembled by Pattie Gresham during her marriages between 1902 and 1943 to insurance executive William L. Busby, to Baptist minister and Masonic activist John Benjamin Green, and to Baptist minister and grocery store owner William M. Driver. The collection spans the period 1896-1969, with the bulk of the material concentrated between 1902 and 1948, and is organized into two series, Name File and Miscellany .
The Name File consists mostly of the financial papers of Pattie Gresham and her three husbands and includes tax records and receipts and cancelled checks relating to church, business, masonic, and personal expenses, some of them for big ticket items such as carriages, automobiles, and pianos. The miscellany of the Pattie Gresham file includes her Duval County, Florida, 1938 voter registration certificate, a 1924 Louisiana certificate of a birth where she served as midwife, business cards for her Africana Beauty Parlor in Jacksonville, Florida, and her Cobb County, Georgia, "pistol toters" license from 1920.
Material in the John Benjamin Green file documents his nasonic activities, particularly his role as field secretary for the women's nasonic organization Heroines of Jericho. William M. Driver was a high official of the Colored Knights of Phythias and that role is documented in his file.
Also part of the Name File is material on artist Annabelle Baker and L. A. Headen, an inventor and automobile manufacterer. Baker was an orphan from Florida whose education at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia, Pattie Gresham financed during the early 1940s. Much of the Annabelle Baker file is correspondence relating to a controversy at Hampton about Baker's pioneering "natural" hairstyle, a story Baker later told in the anthology Tenderheaded: A Comb Bending Collection of Hair Stories (New York: Pocket Books). L. A. Headen was an African-American inventor and automobile manufacterer in whose enterprise Pattie Gresham's second husband, John Benjamin Green, was an investor during the early 1920s. The collection includes a brochure and prospectus published by the Headen Motor Company. Correspondents in the Name File include Annabelle Baker, John Benjamin Green, Pattie Gresham, and Viktor Lowenfeld.
The Miscellany series documents of the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American denomination, as well as other churches and denominations. Reverends Green and Driver were both active in the National Baptist Convention.