Black Twitter: The new Green Book, providing helpful resources to Black community

It was called the Green Book. It helped people in the Black community find safe places to eat and stay overnight when they had to travel during the Jim Crow Era. Now, 55 years later, an online space is vastly emerging into what one researcher is calling its modern-day version.“It’s an open secret,” said Shamika Klassen, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder.Here in the space known as Black Twitter, its users share tips, history, places, common experiences and everything in between. Black Twitter is not a separate social media platform, but part of Twitter, where users participate through hashtags like #BlackOwnedBusinesses, #BlackTech and even #CovidWhileBlack.“Sometimes a good search is not enough, an artifact or archive search is not enough, so I have to jump on Black Twitter,” said historian Erica Buddington.When she’s not searching Black Twitter for work-related resources, she’s tweeting long threads about Black History.Klassen says Black Twitter has played a critical role in recent years during the pandemic and racial unrest. Hashtags like #WhileBlack and #BlackLivesMatter have helped expose more encounters of racism and provide a virtual connection to the community that didn’t exist before the social media age.To prove just how resourceful Black Twitter…
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