The Negro Motorist Green Book wasn't the only travel guide for African Americans listing hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, and other businesses safe to visit during the Jim Crow era of segregation. This explorer makes records searchable across every digitized volume of eight different publications.
Source material held by the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library of Congress.
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.
This link points to a listing that isn’t in the current dataset — it may have been re-extracted since the link was made.
Finding this entry — the full dataset is still loading.
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 seven 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. Publication paused during World War II and resumed with the 1946 edition, which is digitized by the Library of Congress and included here alongside the New York Public Library volumes. Read the full history on Wikipedia →
This explorer searches across eight 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. Each title links to the source scans in NYPL Digital Collections (the 1946 Green Book edition was digitized by the Library of Congress):
Page scans provided by the New York Public Library Digital Collections and, for the 1946 Green Book edition, the Library of Congress. 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 50 digitized volumes across these eight publications. Other Black travel guides — such as the 1939 edition of the Afro-American’s Travel Guide (four later editions of which joined this explorer when NYPL digitized them in 2026) 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.