Interest in the history of Route 66 largely is fueled by the memories of people who traveled the Mother Road from 1946 to the mid-1960s. It’s nostalgia.
Black people don’t share nostalgia as enthusiastically. I surmised it was because Jim Crow laws kept African-Americans at least uncomfortable or, at worst, fearful for their lives until the civil-rights laws began to be enforced.
I still think Jim Crow made an effect. But I recently discovered another likely reason — black people weren’t traveling large chunks of Route 66 at all.
This realization crystallized because of a new interactive map created by the New York Public Library, which digitized 21 volumes of the Negro Motorist Green Book and imported data from 1947 and 1956 volumes into it.
Victor H. Green published his Green Books from 1936 to 1964, during the Jim Crow era. Green said his book would “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable.” “Difficulties” was understood as “beatings or worse.” Although lynchings began to decline by birth of Route 66 in 1926, they continued into the civil-rights era.
I directed the Green Book map to navigate a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1947. The map is designed to find a restaurant every 250 miles and lodging every 750 miles that were welcoming to black motorists. Here’s the result:
Here’s the same route request in 1956:
The routes bypassed large sections of Oklahoma, southern Missouri, the Texas Panhandle and, early on, downstate Illinois. It didn’t take much of a Route 66 path until New Mexico. The route also lacked Route 66 paths in central-west Arizona and California’s Mojave Desert.
I thought at first it was the map taking a path of shortest distance. But even when I made the program take shorter paths to Route 66 towns in the Midwest, it would stubbornly avoid southern Missouri until about Springfield. Ditto for much of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Instead, the program would route into central Kansas and parts of Colorado.
In the west, the program persistently hugged the Mexican border and remain halfway across southern Arizona.
You may ask yourself: “Why?”
The apparent answer: sundown towns.
Parts of central Illinois, western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and the Missouri Ozarks did not allow black people in towns after sundown until at least the civil-rights era. Also, according to research by James Loewen, Kingman, Arizona, and many cities in Los Angeles’ east suburbs were known as sundown towns. Heat maps of black-friendly areas, also created by the library, confirm this.
So it’s obvious those sundown towns wouldn’t have restaurants or lodging that were welcoming to black out-of-towners.
The Chicago-to-L.A. routes seem convoluted. But if you were a black man who had to drive his family across the country, wouldn’t you take the Negro Motorist Green Book’s path of literal least resistance?
(Image of the cover of the 1949 Negro Motorist Green Book)
Quite interesting and a sad fact of history.
I wonder what Nat King Cole was thinking when he sang about getting his kicks on Route 66.
Obviously, his experiences were very different from Bobby Troup’s. Nat would have risked physical kicks (and more) instead of metaphorical kicks. Although it was a sad time in our countries history, it cannot be forgotten, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.