AMNA NAWAZ: A once valuable resource for Black travelers is now the subject of an exhibit in Washington, D.C. "News Hour" community correspondent Gabrielle Hays has the story, part of our ongoing series Race Matters.

CANDACY TAYLOR, Author, "Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America": Those were all in "The Green Book."

GABRIELLE HAYS: "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a guide for African Americans first published in 1936, was a valued resource at a time when travel held the promise of adventure, but was also perilous.

It is now the subject of an exhibit here at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., Candacy Taylor, who wrote "Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America," helped pull the exhibit together with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the D.C. public library system.

The exhibit tells the history of the guide named after its creators, Victor Hugo Green and his wife, Alma.

CANDACY TAYLOR: We wanted to show people who were living their best lives in spite of what was happening around them.

GABRIELLE HAYS: It served as a catalog of hotels, restaurants and other businesses that would serve Black people when racial segregation was legal.

It was published annually until 1967.

At the exhibit center, a compass.

CANDACY TAYLOR: It helps kind of orient you in this place, because, again, it wasn't just the south that had racism.

Jim Crow had no borders.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Sundown towns, communities that excluded nonwhite residents by law, intimidation or violence after dark, were especially dangerous.

For Black Americans who used it, going the wrong direction could mean life or death?

CANDACY TAYLOR: Some sundown towns had a bell that would ring at 6:00, telling the local laborers who were Black and the domestic workers that was their cue to get out of town.

The consequences of you being in a sundown town were everything from harassment to death to lynchings.

There were no sundown town maps, so for travelers you wouldn't know where the minefields were.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Taylor, a photographer and cultural documentarian, spent years researching sites in the guide, driving more than 110,000 miles and photographing nearly 300 sites in 48 states.

CANDACY TAYLOR: This guide was a license to leave.

It was a way for people to find sanctuary and safety on the road.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Some of what she found surprised her, including hundreds of women-owned businesses from hair salons to boarding houses.

We're talking about periods where women couldn't even have bank accounts on their own, but we're seeing them listed in this book, and that seems pretty powerful.

CANDACY TAYLOR: I thought I knew a lot about Black history, and I came across all these women-owned businesses in "The Green Book."

And there were things called tourist tomes, which were kind of like -- not quite boarding houses.

Most of these tourist tomes were run by widowed women who had an extra bedroom and knew how to cook.

And then, when I dug deeper and found the personalities of these women and interviewed some of the relatives of these women, they were fierce, and they were not just independent.

I mean, they had real courage and skills in how to survive.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Through her research, Taylor found some family history, remembered by her stepfather, Ron Burford.

CANDACY TAYLOR: But, yes, now we're in front of Ron's quote and chauffeur's hat here, and he says: "Everybody had one, and you always kept it in the car."

GABRIELLE HAYS: It was safer to claim to be working for a white family than to be driving your own family anywhere.

CANDACY TAYLOR: When the sheriff was walking towards the passenger door, his father turned around and said: "Shh.

Don't say anything."

And the sheriff says: "Where are you going?

Whose car is this?

And who are these people with you?"

His father said: "I'm -- this is my employer's car."

He looked at his wife and pretended he didn't know her and said: "This is the maid, and that's her son in the back and I'm driving them home."

And the police officer said: "Well, where's your hat?

His father said, I'm -- it's hanging in the back, Officer."

And Ron looked and there was a chauffeur's hat hanging there, and it had always been there.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Sharing his stories brought them closer.

CANDACY TAYLOR: It was almost as though, when I did this project, he could trust me with his trauma.

And it really gave me a different perspective and a lens to look at not only our history as Black people, but as his particular history as a dark-skinned Black man growing up in the South.

GABRIELLE HAYS: Even though the days of "The Green Book" are long past, Taylor says the struggle for justice is far from over.

CANDACY TAYLOR: The idea that just because time moves on that we get better as a country is not true.

When people say, oh, it's 2025, why are we still dealing with this, or how could this be happening now, and when you learn about history, you will see that things don't just march forward.

GABRIELLE HAYS: But she points to what Victor Green accomplished.

CANDACY TAYLOR: It doesn't take a lot to make change.

He did this simple thing.

He was a postal worker.

He didn't have up to an eighth grade education.

He had no resources.

There were no computers.

There was no Internet.

And all of this happened with an idea.

So, you don't need to be rich, you don't need a business degree, you don't need all this stuff to make change.

GABRIELLE HAYS: The exhibit is on display through March 2 and also online.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Gabrielle Hays in Washington.