["Sociology Lens, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nRoute 66 has long occupied a privileged place in the American national imagination as a corridor of freedom, mobility, and westward possibility. Yet this celebratory narrative has systematically excluded the experiences of African American travelers, workers, and communities for whom movement along the highway was constrained, dangerous, and unevenly accessible. Drawing on a secondary analysis of 19 archived oral history interviews from the Greater Springfield Route 66 Oral History Project at Missouri State University, this study examines how Black residents of Springfield, Missouri (the city where Route 66 was officially designated in 1926), navigated, worked along, and remembered the highway during the Jim Crow era. Findings reveal that mobility along Route 66 was actively negotiated through the interaction of racial constraints, community‐based infrastructures, and embodied strategies of survival and aspiration. These experiences were foundational to how the highway functioned, yet they remain largely absent from its dominant public mythology. As the centennial of Route 66 approaches, this study argues that recovering these histories is not simply an additive correction to existing narratives but a fundamental rethinking of what the road has historically meant and continues to represent.\n"]