United States Interstate Highway System and Black Neighborhoods

The interstate highway system cut directly through dozens of prosperous Black neighborhoods not by accident, but through a web of federal policy, local planners, and “slum clearance” rhetoric that treated Black communities as expendable land for concrete. From Overtown in Miami and the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Rondo in St. Paul and Hayti in Durham, Black residents had already built dense networks of homes, churches, and businesses before bulldozers arrived. When Congress funded the interstate system in 1956, Black communities were already boxed in by redlining and urban renewal zones that made them the “cheapest” and least politically defended paths for new highways. Black newspapers chronicled families losing generational homes, churches split in half, and main streets turned into on-ramps, even as official planning histories later described the routes as neutral engineering decisions. Black communities did not accept this passively. Neighborhood associations, church coalitions, and local NAACP branches held mass meetings, testified at public hearings, and filed lawsuits, arguing that highway routes were chosen to remove Black residents and suppress political power. In many cases they won concessions or reroutes on paper, only to see revised alignments pushed a block over, still ripping through Black land. ## Black Neighborhoods Before the Highways Before the interstates, many Black neighborhoods marked for demolition were vibrant centers of Black commerce, culture, and homeownership built under segregation’s constraints. Rondo in St. Paul, for example, hosted Black-run businesses, social clubs, and churches along Rondo Avenue, forming what residents remembered as a “city within a city.” The Hill District in Pittsburgh was a nationally known hub of Black music and nightlife, its clubs and theaters feeding the wider jazz world. In Miami, Overtown—once called “Colored Town”—held a dense network of boarding houses, restaurants, and clubs that hosted Black travelers barred from white hotels, with the neighborhood’s listings printed in the Negro Motorist Green Book. Similar stories ran through Hayti in Durham, Birmingham’s 4th Avenue, and Richmond’s Jackson Ward: Black families clustered their homes, businesses, lodges, and churches in the only spaces they could buy, and turned constraint into rich communal life. These communities were not “blighted” by their own making; their housing and infrastructure were constrained by discriminatory lending, lack of city services, and exclusion from mainstream capital markets. Yet their street grids, front porches, and business strips were finely tuned to Black social and economic life and had already produced generations of shopkeepers, teachers, railroad workers, and professionals. ## Policy Design and Targeting The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act poured unprecedented federal dollars into road-building but left local route selection to state highway departments and city governments, which often aligned highway corridors with existing urban renewal plans. In practice, this meant planners layered interstate routes on top of neighborhoods already marked as “slums” in planning reports and redlined on Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, categories that overwhelmingly captured Black areas. City planning documents, commission hearings, and bond campaigns routinely framed Black neighborhoods as obstacles to downtown access and middle-class commuter convenience. Phrases like “slum clearance” and “blight removal” justified taking Black homes at appraised values depressed by earlier discrimination, allowing cities to assemble large tracts for highways at a fraction of suburban land prices. Because Black residents were systematically excluded from city power structures and many were barred from white political parties, they had limited ability to block routes that white homeowners in other neighborhoods successfully resisted. When alternative alignments that would have cut through white areas were drawn, they frequently disappeared after local opposition, leaving Black neighborhoods as the path of least political resistance. ## Displacement and Community Loss The construction of interstate segments through Black neighborhoods resulted in the demolition of thousands of Black-owned homes, churches, and businesses. Families received compensation based on assessed values that never recognized the accumulated social capital of being near extended kin, schools, and congregations, nor the future earning power of business locations that had taken decades to build. Black newspapers documented the human cost with specificity: photographs of houses marked with Xs for demolition, lists of churches scheduled for relocation, and interviews with shopkeepers who lost their foot traffic overnight. Funeral programs and church anniversary booklets from these neighborhoods now double as records of institutions that were amputated by concrete. Displaced residents were often pushed into already overcrowded housing or public projects, further concentrating poverty and undermining the homeownership gains they had carved out despite discrimination. The highways not only tore up physical streets but also severed the walkable connections between Black business districts and the surrounding homes that sustained them. ## Resistance, Memory, and Repair Black communities mounted organized resistance as soon as highway plans became clear. In city after city, citizens’ committees, church groups, and civil rights organizations demanded public hearings, prepared alternative route maps, and testified to the damage that routes would inflict. Some campaigns succeeded in shifting alignments slightly, preserving parts of neighborhoods; others delayed construction long enough to build political coalitions and legal precedents that later communities would draw on. Over time, as the harms of the routing became undeniable, Black scholars, community historians, and survivors have rebuilt the record that early highway histories erased. Oral history projects, neighborhood reunions, and local commemorations now document the businesses, clubs, and churches that existed before the bulldozers, insisting that what stands under the overpasses is not an empty “no-man’s land” but the site of destroyed Black worlds. In recent years, proposals to cap highways with parks, reroute traffic, or remove elevated segments have created new arenas where the original injustice is being named. Black communities argue that any repair must begin by acknowledging that highways were instruments of racial dispossession, not neutral infrastructure, and that descendants of those displaced are owed a central stake in decisions about the land and any economic benefits that follow.

The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.

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