Navigating the Green Book; The Negro Travelers' Green Book Interactive Map

Extract

The Web site Navigating the Green Book provides visitors with map-based tools for exploring the landscape of Jim Crow–era travel in the United States. From 1936 to 1966 Victor Green produced a guide for African American travelers that highlighted the restaurants, hotels, service stations, and nightclubs that provided service to black patrons. The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has digitized its twenty-one-volume collection of Green Books, as the annual travel guides were informally known. NYPL Labs, tasked with expanding the use of the library's collections through digital tools, created Navigating the Green Book to enable virtual travelers to explore the guides and imagine “how the size of the world can change depending on the color of your skin.”

The site provides a link to the Schomburg Center's digital collection of Green Books and uses coordinate data extracted from the 1947 and 1956 travel guides to map the locations of businesses that served African American travelers. The data from the 1956 volume was provided by another Green Book mapping project developed at the University of South Carolina. That project allows visitors to search that Green Book through a geocoded Google map, or to search and filter listings by name, address, establishment type, or territory. NYPL's Navigating the Green Book does not provide these same search capabilities, but it does allow visitors to discover locations using a navigable map. Visitors can toggle between the 1947 and 1956 maps, and “lodging” or “restaurant” icons will take them directly to the digitized page of the guide where the establishment was listed.