Black Albuquerque on Route Sixty-Six

When the NAACP established a branch in Albuquerque in nineteen fourteen, the city's Black population numbered two hundred forty-four people. That branch became the hub of civil rights organizing in New Mexico, drawing on a community that was small in number but established in institution-building.

Grant Chapel AME, founded in eighteen eighty-two, is the oldest African American church in Albuquerque. During the World War Two era, it served as the meeting place for the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Council of Negro Women. The church's name was changed in nineteen oh five to honor Bishop Alexander Grant. It has been a continuous institutional anchor for the Black community through periods of growth, segregation, and integration.

From roughly eighteen seventy to the nineteen fifties, Albuquerque maintained segregated hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and neighborhoods. Restrictive covenants kept Black families out of certain neighborhoods. African American men were generally limited to employment as porters, janitors, and cooks; women to domestic service. The segregation was not as systematically codified as the Jim Crow South, but it was practiced.

Route Sixty-Six, which ran through the heart of the city along Central Avenue, was a specific problem. The Green Book, Victor Green's annual guide for Black motorists, listed Albuquerque accommodations that were safe and welcoming. Some Central Avenue establishments were not. Traveling while Black on America's Main Street required navigation that white travelers did not need.

The Albuquerque city council passed a Fair Housing Practices law in nineteen sixty-three. The nineteen sixty-four federal Civil Rights Act brought formal integration. But the patterns set by decades of legal segregation do not dissolve with legislation. The community that organized in Grant Chapel AME has been in Albuquerque for one hundred forty years. The population is still small by regional standards. The institutions remain.