How Interstate Highways Gutted Communities and Reinforced Segregation

Guno צְבִי

Guno צְבִי

We fight, We win
When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, it authorized what was then the largest public works program in U.S. history. The law promised to construct 41,000 miles of an ambitious interstate highway system that would criss-cross the nation, dramatically expanding America's roadways and connecting 42 state capital cities and 90 percent of all American cities with populations over 50,000. Its goal was to eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes and traffic jams that impede fast and safe cross-country travel. President Dwight Eisenhower called the massive infrastructure project “essential to the national interest.”

But the highway expansion, implemented largely between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, came at a huge cost to America’s urban communities of color.

The neighborhoods destroyed and families uprooted by highway projects were largely Black and poor, wrote New York University law professor Deborah N. Archer in her article “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction.” And that was by design, she noted. Policy makers and planners saw highway construction as a convenient way to raze neighborhoods considered undesirable or blighted. And they deployed the massive infrastructure elements—multi-lane roadbeds, concrete walls, ramps and overpasses—as tools of segregation, physical buffers to isolate communities of color.


https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation
 
In the first half of the 20th century, Miami’s culturally vibrant Black community of Overtown was widely considered the “Harlem of the South” and “Little Broadway.” But after the passage of the 1956 highway bill, the expansion of I-95 through Miami led to the destruction of 87 acres of housing and commercial property in the community. According to Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, only 8,000 of an estimated population of 40,000 remained in Overtown after the highway expansion. Blocked from moving into white neighborhoods, displaced residents were forced to crowd into nearby sections of the city already struggling with poverty and urban decay.
 
Somebody dropped the ball on NOT putting these Freeways in 'Ethnic' communities in NYC, ... whether we needed the Freeways or not.
 
I should point out that I know all about this, my Uncle was one of the leaders of a group trying to prevent a highway being built through Milwaukee for exactly this reason.

As I recall they delayed the project but did not prevent it.
 
Hello guno,

guno said:
When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, it authorized what was then the largest public works program in U.S. history. The law promised to construct 41,000 miles of an ambitious interstate highway system that would criss-cross the nation, dramatically expanding America's roadways and connecting 42 state capital cities and 90 percent of all American cities with populations over 50,000. Its goal was to eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes and traffic jams that impede fast and safe cross-country travel. President Dwight Eisenhower called the massive infrastructure project “essential to the national interest.”

But the highway expansion, implemented largely between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, came at a huge cost to America’s urban communities of color.

The neighborhoods destroyed and families uprooted by highway projects were largely Black and poor, wrote New York University law professor Deborah N. Archer in her article “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction.” And that was by design, she noted. Policy makers and planners saw highway construction as a convenient way to raze neighborhoods considered undesirable or blighted. And they deployed the massive infrastructure elements—multi-lane roadbeds, concrete walls, ramps and overpasses—as tools of segregation, physical buffers to isolate communities of color.


https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation
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Seems like a logical thing for racists whites in power to do. Build their bright new future by destroying the lives of blacks.

And that is an age when many 'maga' people think America was great. Great jobs, great expansion, great home mortgages, all for whites. If a black woman refused to give up her seat for a white man, she would be arrested.
 
Jack said:
Somebody dropped the ball on NOT putting these Freeways in 'Ethnic' communities in NYC, ... whether we needed the Freeways or not.
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Good point, city highways have more traffic than rural highways.

They actually could have built a lot more to relieve congestion of the highways in the cities.
 
Newsflash to Guano: Rich folk impact political decisions at the detriment of those with less. This has exactly nothing to do with race.
 
Primavera said:
Could they use Guano as blacktop?
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