Being black and traveling away from home during the Jim Crow–era involved a great deal of planning, faith, and a reliable travel guide called the Negro Motorist Green Book. Victor H. Green, an African American postal worker from Harlem published this roadside companion from 1936 to 1966. His Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, salons, barbershops, taverns, nightclubs, tailors, garages, and real estate offices that served African Americans. It was considered the "Bible of Black Travel." This project documents Green Book sites in Los Angeles County and recognizes their historic value and the role they played in possibly saving people's lives.

Candacy Taylor is an award-winning African American author, photographer, and cultural documentarian with a master's degree in visual criticism. She owns Taylor Made Culture, a company that produces multimedia projects in the form of books, websites, and traveling exhibitions. Taylor Made projects are interdisciplinary in nature and critically investigate issues of race, culture, and identity, within contemporary political, social, and cultural landscapes. Her work has been featured in over thirty publications, including: the New Yorker, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, AARP, and the Photographer's Forum (cover), as well as on PBS and NPR. Taylor is a freelance cultural documentarian for the National Park Service. For her project, American Roots, she was one out of five people selected for an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress and won the KCET (Los Angeles's PBS station) Editor's Choice Award for the televised program, ArtBound.