Tell the whole story. That’s the goal as $3 million is awarded by the National Trust to sites vital to Black history.

One place that’s been around since the early 1900s is now looking to bring back a very special room.

The story goes, in the old days of the Hotel Metropolitan in Paducah, Kentucky, there'd be a slice of pie for the man playing guitar on the porch and slices of pie waiting for the guests in the rooms upstairs.

"Food had a real part in the hotel,” said Betty Dobson, who runs the hotel today. "Food is the way most Black people express their love."

Dobson said there's something you should know about who was being served those slices of pie.

"Oh, you wanted that pie story?" she smiled.

The man on the porch? That was BB King. The guests in the rooms upstairs? That was any number of musicians, so famous that their faces are on murals across the country. They were acts like Ike and Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, and Moms Mabley.

"Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Billie Holliday," Dobson listed off. "It still excites me to come through these doors cause those famous souls were here."

Dobson will tell you the place that's key to the Hotel Metropolitan's story is an unassuming little building around the back.

"The Purple Room," she said, unlocking a door to a two-room building with dirt floors.

Before their gigs in Paducah, this was the space where the acts would rehearse, meaning this little neighborhood had free admission, front porch seats to hear the greats.

"Folks were dancing!” Dobson laughed. “It sounded like Mardi Gras in there! It kinda tells you there was some fun in here."

Dobson remembers her work in the room.

"If your suit needed pressing, I could take care of you here at the hotel," Dobson continued, showing an old suit presser in the Purple Room.

Dobson said the presser and the barber station at the hotel were things born out of necessity.

In the 1940 edition of the Green Book, an on-the-road guide for Black travelers to find safe places, there were only two hotels listed for Paducah. Dobson shared, it was in the years of Jim Crow laws, the Purple Room had to be here as rehearsal space.

"The venues were white,” she explained. “It was intolerable to have you there in the daytime if you were a Black entertainer. Once they got to here, being owned mainly by women, I can see that compassion to say, ‘Come on in, baby. I know it's been hard, but you done made it here. Go on upstairs and lay down, get you some rest, and we'll make a plan tomorrow.’"

Dobson said something has just come along to help her tell the story of the people who stayed in these rooms.

The National Trust has just awarded $3 million to 40 different sites important to Black history, including the Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio, the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge in Atlanta, Georgia, the Sarah Rector Mansion in Kansas City, Missouri, and an unassuming little building around the back of the Hotel Metropolitan.

Dobson wants to use the funds to restore the Purple Room, to make it a gathering space again.

"If I'm here or not, the dream is to make the Hotel Metropolitan story whole," she said.

For decades, a series of books were bought by millions and was considered by many to be literally life-saving. One woman is making it her life’s work to document the story of these books. Their reach touches every community in the country.

There are so many old vacation memories recorded in the time of the late 1940s and 1950s, as ads encouraged families to go out on the road and explore America. Thinking back on these years of unprecedented opportunity to experience the country, someone had a question: how did Black families travel during a time of sundown towns?

“Sundown towns were all-white communities,” said writer and photographer Candacy Taylor. “If you were caught there after sundown, there could be severe consequences and even death. My innocent question was if there’s all these sundown towns, what did the Black people do? Looking back on vacation history and marketing, there’s white folks at the beach, and you never see Black people in any of these images, and there’s a reason for that.”

At night, going through unfamiliar towns so far from home, where did these families stay? How did they know if they were in a sundown town? There have been many stops in answering these questions for Taylor. On one day, the questions led her to Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia.

“That’s the original sign, but ‘funeral home’ was beneath here,” said Taylor, snapping a picture outside a building. “We’re at Haugabrooks Funeral Home, but now it’s just called Haugabrooks because it is an art space.”

There’s an important history to Haugabrooks, as one of the original sites to be featured in the Green Book.

“It was everything from drug stores to banks,” Taylor said of the Green Book. “Anything you might need on the road was in the Green Book. It was like a Black Yellow Pages. Most Black families spent weeks preparing for a road trip. You’d pick up a Green Book. You’d go through and figure out the places you wanted to stay. This was the Jim Crow era in general. The Green Book started publication in 1936, and it lasted through 1967.”

Taylor snaps pictures of stained glass inside Haugabrooks.

“There’s something visceral about being in a space that’s tied to this history. It’s almost like a spiritual experience for me.”

Taylor’s work, photographing and writing about the Green Book sites, is a project of rare ambition.

“I’ve cataloged over 10,000 Green Book sites,” she said. “I’ve scouted 6,000, and right now, I’m on the road scouting the remaining 4,000.”

Part of Taylor’s work is in her book Overground Railroad, where she details original Green Book sites like The Rossonian in Denver, Colorado, the Hampton House resort in Miami, Florida, and the Regal Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

The work is being archived at the Library of Congress and is used both for an exhibition with the Smithsonian and a mobile app Taylor is developing. She’s telling the story of the Black family on those unfamiliar roads in the Jim Crow era.

“This feels like my life’s work,” said Taylor. “I think we’ve lost our way in understanding how race and racism have led to where we are today. I felt it’s even important we tell this story now, and we look at this history through the lens of the Green Book. I don’t know where this ends, but I know it’s important, and I feel it’s bigger than me at this point.”