Seattle couple’s Black traveling YouTube channel visits Oregon

Fresh from an unforgettable journey to the Galápagos Islands with the Black Travel Alliance — and with an upcoming TikTok-related trip to New York on the horizon — Anthony and Marlie Love found themselves at a crossroads. Juggling their growing travel platform with full-time jobs was becoming unsustainable.

That’s when they made a decision to leave their jobs — Marlie at a nonprofit and Anthony at Boeing — and dedicate themselves fully to “Traveling While Black,” their popular YouTube travel series that started in Seattle and recently brought them to Oregon.

“We listened to this 2 Chainz song,” Anthony said. “And 2 Chainz said, ‘If you got something, people want to see it, you gotta do what’s good for you and yours.’”

It’s been almost a year since the Loves started working on the channel full-time, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive — with a growing community of 14,400 subscribers on YouTube.

“What we can tell, and from feedback we’ve gotten, it actually serves people,” Anthony said about the channel. “People like seeing it.”

The pair began their channel in April 2019 after moving from Missouri to Seattle and having no clue what to expect from their new home — especially as a Black couple.

The Loves pulled inspiration from the “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” an annual guidebook for Black travelers published from 1936 to 1966. The book, created by Victor Hugo Green, helped Black travelers find safe places to stay and travel in the U.S.

“We wanted to continue to explore and see this new area,” Marlie said. “But then we were still kind of nervous, like, ‘What’s the experience like for a Black traveler up here in the Pacific Northwest?’ So we kind of just mirrored all those things together and said, ‘Let’s start a YouTube channel to help the people like us, transients coming up to Seattle.’”

In October 2019, they started posting short videos on YouTube documenting their travels in the city. What started as day trips in the city quickly expanded to destinations across Washington state — and before long, the entire Pacific Northwest.

Since starting their channel, the Loves have featured Portland, central Oregon and the Oregon coast in videos.

“My thinking was, ‘Oh yeah, this is kind of like a modern day Green Book type deal,’” Anthony said. “Let’s ride that spirit and encourage folks to get out here.”

Incorporating safety and comfort for Black people into every episode forms the foundation of their channel.

“That comfort level was always a part of it from the beginning,” Anthony said. “That was sort of that high priority resource we wanted to provide, first and foremost.”

Rated on a 1-10 scale, Black comfortability incorporates the number of other Black people seen, visibility of inclusive signage, prevalence of Black history, most recent Black population numbers and the Loves’ subjective experience.

On their most recent road trip along the Oregon Coast — visiting Coos Bay, Newport, Cannon Beach and Astoria — the Loves modified this scale, taking Oregon’s history into account.

Listen to their reflections and travel insights on the latest episode of the Peak Northwest: ‘Traveling While Black’ series visits the Oregon coast: Peak Northwest podcast.

The modified comfort scale swaps out Black history and population for diversity in destination marketing and quality access to local cultural groups. The Loves chose to make these changes after researching Oregon’s history of exclusionary laws.

“For the Oregon coast road trip series, we said, ‘Okay, we need to switch it up just a little bit more,’ because some of the criteria was Black history and Black population numbers,” Marlie said. “And from Oregon, we knew that it was already going to be low. We can’t change that.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black residents made up an estimated 0.9% of Clatsop County’s population, 1% of Lincoln County’s population and 0.7% of Coos County’s population in 2024, based on 2020 data.

Understanding the Black history within each destination is another component to their series. In Coos Bay, the Loves explored the story of Alonzo Tucker, a Black resident who was lynched by a white mob in 1902 — the only documented lynching in Oregon’s history. Tucker is honored with a historical marker outside the Coos History Museum.

“We always feel that history is important to understanding how a place is today,” Anthony said. “That’s why we try to touch on it in some capacity on any episode we do, to our best ability connected to Black history, but if not, some type of history.”

Their goal is to shed light on these historical aspects and help viewers understand the deeper context of the places they visit.

“We are here to enable travel for everyone,” Marlie said. “Our mission is to build that bridge so that we all can travel together, meet each other, and live harmoniously.”

Over 170 episodes, the Loves have reported only one bad experience — in Forks, Washington.

“In the moment, we were just worried about safety, 100% safety, because the whole vibe was off,” Anthony said about the experience. “After we left and got out of that unsafe condition we felt we were in, that’s when we started doing our research and finding out that there were other instances where people had very, very bad encounters with the people there.”

Even though the experience was uncomfortable, the Loves emphasized their channel is based on personal experience.

“Ultimately, we want you to go to these places, and let us know what you see, what you do, so we have more of a collective experience,” Anthony said. “And then furthermore, we can also make it more normalized for people that look like us, because at the end of the day, if a place only looks one way for so long, it’s not going to change unless we go and change it.”