How America Built Its Highways To Serve The Wealthy And White


How America Built Its Highways To Serve The Wealthy And White
The 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act was used to decimate Black commercial centers

AFRICANGLOBE – The following is an excerpt from The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (A Quadrant Book)by Eric Avila. Copyright © 2014.






One of my colleagues once told me a joke: if future anthropologists want to find the remains of Black people in a postapocalypse America, they will simply have to find the ruins of the nearest freeway. Yet such collegial jocularity contained a sobering reminder that the victories associated with the freeway revolt usually did not extend to Black urban communities, where highway construction often took a disastrous toll. To greater and lesser degrees, race—racial identity and racial ideology—shaped the geography of highway construction in urban America, fueling new patterns of racial inequality that exacerbated an unfolding “urban crisis” in postwar America.

In many southern cities, local city planners took advantage of federal moneys to target Black communities point-blank; in other parts of the nation, highway planners found the paths of least resistance, wiping out Black commercial districts. The bodies and spaces of Black people, historically coded as “blight” in planning discourse, provided an easy target for a federal highway program that usually coordinated its work with private redevelop- ment schemes and public policies like redlining, urban renewal, and slum clearance.

My colleague’s joke also signaled a shared suspicion among Black city people that the interstate generation of freeway builders targeted their communities with malicious intent. In a 1997 interview, for example, a former Overtown resident begged to understand why state officials routed Interstate 95 through the heart of Miami’s historic Black neighborhood: “Now all you White folk . . . you tell me the justification. . . . If that isn’t racism you tell me what it is.” In St. Paul, Minnesota, after Interstate 94 bisected the city’s historic Black neighborhood, a former resident explained his belief that the “White man’s freeway” was built to “allow White people to get from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis five, ten minutes faster.”

In the context of urban history, infrastructure can make or break a community. In the United States, the historical development of urban infrastructure has both formed and followed the inscriptions of race, class, and gender on the urban landscape. Ample in more affluent communities, usually absent or minimal in historic concentrations of urban poverty, infrastructure does not serve its public equally. Some cities have a more equitable distribution of infrastructure than others, but many urban neighborhoods remain woefully underserved. During the postwar period, the interstate highways sparked the development of new communities, new jobs, and new forms of commerce and enterprise, particularly for the White suburban middle class of the postwar era.

They did not (and do not) serve affluent communities very well because many in those communities successfully resisted local routing proposals, and they often decimated poor, working-class, and racialized neighborhoods, wholly vulnerable to the conclusions that highway planners derived from their meticulous data. These neighborhoods harbored the very conditions that infrastructure is designed to prevent—congestion, pollution, disease, crime—yet remained bereft of public investment. A better solution, in the logic of the time, was to simply eradicate these communities altogether through invasive public-works projects. Small wonder, then, that Black urban communities continue to express a pervasive belief that conquest and modernization are two sides of the same unlucky coin.

This book strives to listen to what inner-city people think about the freeways that fracture their communities and to open our senses to what is seen and heard in the shadows of the freeway, in the communities exempt from the dominant narrative of the freeway revolt. To some extent, The Folklore of the Freeway records long-standing grievances against the freeway and its presence in the inner city, but it moves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization to explore a dynamic relationship between structure and culture, between the physical fact of the freeway and its refraction through the prisms of identity, language, and place. The surprising results of this investigation tell us not only what freeways do to inner-city people, but also what people do to inner-city freeways. Spatial justice remains elusive in the barrio and the ghetto, but there the freeway revolt continues.


By: Eric Avila