The West End Service Station on Route 66 in Edwardsville, Illinois, is hosting a display on local Black history — including a bit of the city’s own — through the end of this month.
The former gas station at 620 St. Louis St. (aka Route 66), converted into a visitor’s center in 2023, presents Black travelers’ history on the highway and seeks to teach the public about Negro Motorist Green Books that were published for decades during the Jim Crow segregationist era.
The display commemorates Black History Month in February and will conclude at the end of the month.
The Edwardsville Intelligencer newspaper reported:
Of the 89 counties along Route 66, half of them were sundown towns, towns that prohibited Black people from staying overnight making it difficult for them to find a place to dine or sleep.
That’s is where the Green Book comes in. A Green Book was a guide for Black travelers to help them find places that were safe to stay. Towns that were named in Green Books included East St. Louis, Brooklyn and Lovejoy, Illinois.
Edwardsville was not in the list of towns that were safe for Black travelers.
An excellent history of the Green Books can be found in Candacy Taylor’s book “Overground Railroad” (Amazon affiliate link).
The display also contains Edwardsville’s Black history, including its schools being desegregated in 1951 — about three years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in schools.
For years, Black students had attended Lincoln School in Edwardsville.
It also contains the story of Mannie Jackson, who attended Edwardsville schools after desegregation, bought the Harlem Globetrotters and eventually bought Lincoln School, which became the Mannie Jackson Center for the Humanities of Lewis and Clark Community College.
The display is free through the end of the month.
Gina Lathan, president of Route History in Springfield, Illinois, also will present the Black experience on Route 66 at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 27. Route History is housed in an old gas station a few blocks from Route 66.
—