New Mexico Historical Review Volume 90 Number 3 Article 3 7-1-2015 Courageous Motorists: African American Pioneers on Route 66 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation . "Courageous Motorists: African American Pioneers on Route 66." New Mexico Historical Review 90, 3 (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol90/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. • Courageous Motorists • African American Pioneers on Route 66 FRANK NORRIS eginning in the mid-1920s, before the advent of the interstate high- way system in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. Highway 66 was just one of many ribbons of asphalt that brought Americans west to the Pacific BCoast. For many this highway was magical because it connected the conven- tional, established Midwest, with sunny, prosperous southern California. As Nat “King” Cole crooned in the runaway Bobby Troup hit from 1946, Route 66 “winds from Chicago to L.A., more than 2,000 miles all the way,” and along the way it passed through portions of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Many people connect Route 66—known more recently as “the Mother Road”—to America’s love affair with the automobile, 1950s-era nostalgia, and the freedom of the open road. As author and storyteller Michael Wallis has characterized it, “Route 66 . will always mean going somewhere.”1 However, not everyone enjoyed the same degree of freedom while travel- ing long distances along Route 66 or other highways. Cole and other American blacks, for example, yearned to take the wheel and experience adventure out on the open road, but the prevalent racial attitudes of mid-twentieth-century America forced them to adapt, to be inventive, and at times to simply endure.2 Despite sizable challenges, a courageous and growing stream of blacks took to the road between the mid-1920s and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of Frank Norris is a historian with the National Trails Intermountain Region office of the National Park Service in Santa Fe. The office helps administer the Route 66 Corridor Preser- vation Program as well as nine national historic trails. Norris / Courageous Motorists 293 1964.3 The more intrepid motorists—the exact number of whom will never be known—broke with convention and headed west to California. Although the history of black motorists has recently received considerable attention, most researchers have focused on travel east of the Mississippi River across states where most blacks lived.4 Writers have also looked closely at vari- ous guidebooks targeted for African Americans, especially Victor Green’s travel guide.5 This article will use the Route 66 experience as a case study to examine how an African American family or a black businessman might have experi- enced a long-distance driving trip across the Great Plains, the mountain states, and on to the Pacific Coast. It will address a number of unresolved questions: What was the racial geography of the areas along Route 66 west of the Missis- sippi River? What was the social status of African Americans in the various Route 66 communities, and how did that translate into the treatment of black travelers? Did guidebooks provide an effective way to make the trip west more comfortable for African American motorists? For black travelers without guide- books, what strategies did they employ to eat and get rest along the way? How many facilities welcomed black travelers along Route 66? During the half cen- tury that has elapsed since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, what has become of these “safe havens” along the road? More than a decade before the creation of Route 66 in 1926, sizable numbers of African Americans—perhaps more than a million—had been migrating out of the rural south as part of the Great Migration. Many settled in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other large northern cities, but considerable numbers also headed west to California.6 They abandoned the South en masse not only to find economic opportunity in the manufacturing and service sectors but also to escape painful forms of discrimination. In the South, a bewildering array of Jim Crow laws and customs consigned African Americans to a second-class status in education, jobs, political expression, and access to public accommodations. For newly arrived blacks, life outside the South was by no means easy. Through sheer numbers, however, blacks in the north attained a new identity and, in many areas, led a cultural renaissance.7 While the separation of the races was most oppressive—and visually obvious— south of the Mason-Dixon Line, northern states and cities were discriminatory as well, though in more subtle forms. One manifestation of this discrimination in northern states, primarily outside larger cities, was the “sundown town.” Sociol- ogist James Loewen defines a “sundown town,” statistically, as a city, town, or vil- lage that has nine or fewer black residents. As he notes, the racial geography of many states, particularly those in the Midwest, was highly uneven: some cities and counties had long been home to a fairly sizable number of black residents, while adjacent cities and counties counted few if any blacks in their population 294 New Mexico Historical Review / Volume 90, Number 3, Summer 2015 totals.8 Although some scholars have suggested that this unevenness was the result of varying economic opportunities or simply historical happenstance, Loe- wen cites many confirmed examples of new black residents “being asked to leave town before sundown” to argue that white prejudice played a strong role in the relative absence of African Americans in many cities and counties. These resi- dential patterns were most pronounced during the early to mid-twentieth cen- tury, but Loewen suggests that, in many areas, they persisted for decades after the enactment, during the 1960s, of major federal civil rights legislation.9 Because much of Loewen’s research focuses on the demography of Illinois and adjacent midwestern states, a key question arises: to what extent did these pat- terns persist in the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the various Pacific Coast states? To be more specific: when black travelers headed southwest from Illinois along U.S. Highway 66, were “sundown towns” the rule or the exception? Census statistics for the years 1930 and 1950 shed considerable light on “sun- down towns” and their prevalence along the various segments of Route 66. Using Loewen’s criteria, these figures reveal that all seven of the states with significant Route 66 mileage had a considerable number of sundown towns (see table 1). In both years, at least one-fifth of enumerated communities in all seven states were sundown towns. In 1930 sundown towns comprised 44 of the 89 iden- tified Route 66 communities (49.4 percent of all communities), while twenty years later, sundown towns numbered 25 of 73 identified Route 66 communi- ties (34.2 percent of all communities). These statistics strongly suggest that sun- down towns were prevalent along the entire length of Route 66, not just in the Midwest. However, there does appear to be a diminution of the sundown-town phenomenon between 1930 and 1950.10 What the statistics cannot show is why so many cities and towns along the Route 66 corridor had few if any black residents. Regardless of the historical causes, the census figures demonstrate that cities and large towns, not surpris- ingly, were highly likely to have a significant number of black residents, while small towns and villages were most likely to be “sundown towns.” It was therefore safest for blacks, in their Route 66 trip planning, to aim toward the larger, more cosmopolitan population centers where they were most likely to encounter a siz- able black neighborhood with its own hotels, rooming houses, and restaurants. Beyond the pitfalls of staying in small towns and villages, African Ameri- cans heading west along Route 66 needed to be aware of the levels of discrim- ination that prevailed in the various states along the way. Discrimination was widespread but varied considerably from state to state and within those states as well. In Illinois, for example, discrimination against blacks was legally forbidden thanks to the efforts of John Thomas, a black legislator from Chicago. In June 1885, Thomas convinced the state legislature to pass a law stating that all Illinois Norris / Courageous Motorists 295 Table 1. SUNDOWN TOWNS ALONG ROUTE 66, 1930 AND 1950 1930 1930 1950 1950 State Total Towns Sundown Towns Total Towns Sundown Towns Illinois 20 9 17 6 Missouri 13 3 14 6 Kansas 1 0 1 0 Oklahoma 18 8 15 4 Texas* 5 2 5 2 New Mexico 8 6 5 2 Arizona 10 8 5 2 California 14 8 11 3 Total 89 44 73 25 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census of Population and Housing, 1930, vol. 3 (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1932), state tables 13, 15, 16, 21, and 22; U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census of Population by State, 1950, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953) state tables 6, 14, 34, 38, 40, and 42. *Census statistics for Texas refers to counties rather than cities. residents had equal access to hotels, restaurants, transportation, and other pub- lic accommodations. Enforcement of the law proved unworkable, however as a result it was widely ignored.11 Blacks who traveled through Illinois in the mid-twentieth century, how- ever, were treated differently depending on race relations in specific commu- nities.