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Green Books Travel Guide Explorer
Explore the directory of safe businesses and services for Black travelers, 1936–1966
The Negro Motorist Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, and roadhouses safe to visit during the Jim Crow era of segregation. This explorer makes those records searchable across all published editions.
Source scans held by the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center. Data extracted via OCR and named-entity recognition.
Green Books Travel Guide Explorer
Explore the directory of safe businesses and services for Black travelers, 1936–1966
This tool lets you browse structured data extracted from the Green Books published by Victor H. Green & Co. between 1937 and 1966 — annual travel guides that helped Black Americans 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. Read the full history on Wikipedia →
Page scans are held by the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Entries were extracted from those scans using an 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.
There are OCR and entity-extraction errors in this data viewer, always use the original source 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.