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Green Books Travel Guide Explorer
Explore the directory of safe businesses and services for Black travelers, 1930–1966
The Negro Motorist Green Book and other African American travel guides listed hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, and other businesses safe to visit during the Jim Crow era of segregation. This explorer makes those records searchable across every volume and publication.
Source material held by the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Data extracted using an LLM-enhanced Directory Pipeline for OCR and named-entity recognition.
Green Books Travel Guide Explorer
Explore the directory of safe businesses and services for Black travelers, 1930–1966
Try removing filters or adjusting your search.
Charts cover the full dataset — counting extracted listings, or resolved businesses where noted. Click a year, category, state, or cell to see its listings and leave the charts.
Charts appear once all entries finish loading…
This tool lets you browse structured data extracted from the Green Books published by Victor H. Green & Co. between 1937 and 1966, alongside six other travel guides published for Black Americans between 1930 and 1962 — guides that helped Black travelers find welcoming hotels, restaurants, and businesses during the era of racial segregation in the United States.
The Green Book was published annually by Victor H. Green & Co. from 1936 to 1966 as a guide for Black Americans navigating the Jim Crow era; the earliest edition digitized here is 1937. Read the full history on Wikipedia →
This explorer searches across seven publications at once. Colors mark each publication throughout the site — on table rows, sidebar filters, and the coverage grid in each entry’s detail panel:
Page scans provided by the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Entries were extracted from those scans using an LLM-enhanced OCR and named-entity-recognition pipeline. The Explorer uses the IIIF standard extensively — entry thumbnails are cropped from the original page images, and each entry’s source link opens the IIIF viewer at the exact page location.
This dataset carries occasional OCR, entity-extraction, and entry-alignment errors, so always treat the original published pages as the authoritative source. This explorer is a way to engage with the directories more deeply, not a replacement for them. Data has not been reviewed for 100% accuracy.
The dataset also reaches only as far as digitization has: it covers the 45 digitized volumes across these seven publications. Other Black travel guides — such as the Afro-American’s Travel Guide (1939) and The Black American Travel Guide (1971), held in the Schomburg Center’s Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division but not digitized here — are not represented, so charts and counts describe the digitized corpus, not the full historical record. See NYPL’s research guide, “More African American Travel Guides!” → You can explore the shape of the digitized corpus in .
With gratitude to Maira Liriano, Associate Chief Librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, for her advice and guidance on this project.