For St. Louis resident Irv Logan, growing up alongside Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri, didn’t just inspire his career working on cars, it expanded his worldview. He met all kinds of Black travelers who stayed at the family-run Alberta’s Hotel — a Green Book destination owned by his grandmother Alberta Ellis — including performers on the Chitlin Circuit, the Harlem Globetrotters and people from outside the country.
“The first time that I met a person of African descent from outside of the United States was a man from Colombia. He came to stay for a few weeks doing a job somewhere in the Ozarks, and he had to stay [at Alberta’s], of course, because there was really nowhere else for him to stay,” Logan said. “No one ever taught us that there were [people] of African descent outside of the United States, so that was an eye-opening conversation I had with him. That was my first awareness that some of what I had learned in school didn’t cover all of the bases.”
A weekend-long festival at Missouri History Museum will celebrate the ways Route 66 connected Missouri to the rest of the country and the world. The Route 66 Centennial Festival runs April 30 through May 3, and it will feature artifacts from the iconic highway, a live performance of mid-century radio hits, and a series of author talks and conversations with people who lived and worked along the route.
Logan will speak as part of a panel discussion about how Black motorists traveled the highway during the Jim Crow era, when Black travelers had few safe options for places to refuel, dine and stay the night…