Lost Black History
By Don Valentine
The Eisenhower administration created the Interstate Highway System in 1956. The planners, through intention or indifference, segregated the Black from the White communities. The trend of Redlining minority neighborhoods devalued Black properties. This made this land cheapest for the Interstate Freeway project to purchase. The legal doctrine of Eminent Domain prohibited any challenges to Federal purchase of the land.
Let’s understand the legal principle of Eminent Domain which established the legality for this cement segregation. Eminent Domain is the power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use. This doctrine is based on the 5th Amendment. It has 3 keyelements: The property acquired must be taken for a “public use;” The state must pay “just compensation” in exchange for the property; No person must be deprived of their property without due process of law.
Deborah Archer, a professor at the New York University School of Law, wrote “The highways were being built just as courts around the country were striking down traditional tools of racial segregation. So, for example, courts were striking down the use of racial zoning to keep Black people in certain communities.” Interstate highways became a discrete legal way to protect White communities from the undesirable Black communities.
The LA Times noted, “Overall, within the first two decades of highway construction alone, more than 1 million people had lost their homes nationwide. In Nashville, civic officials added a curve to I-40 in 1967 to avoid a White community in favor of knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses in a prominent Black neighborhood. Highway planners in Birmingham, did the same thing when routing I- 59.”
The Miami area is another example of Eminent Domain being used to segregate Blacks. In Miami I-95 was begun in 1957. Planning officials decided to run I-95 right through Overtown, decimating the prosperous neighborhood. This tactic was not exclusive to just a few Southern cities. Black locales were destroyed across the country: in Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, Columbus, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Syracuse, Montgomery, New Orleans, Kansas City, Oakland, to name a few.
Planning scholar Alan A Altshuler noted, “…by the mid-1960s, when interstate construction was well underway, it was generally believed that the new highway system would displace a million people from their homes before it [was] completed.” Reuters reported, “Some Black neighborhoods were targeted even when more logical routes were available, research by the late urban historian Raymond Mohl shows.”
President Obama appointed a Black man, the renowned attorney, Anthony Foxx to be Secretary of Transportation in 2013. Secretary Foxx in a Washing Post interview said, “The highway system, in it’s planning and implementation, drove a physical wedge through many parts of America. I really believe that this is an issue that has been on the shelf collecting dust for a long time.” Note: These events are not taught in schools. That is why we need our Black press. If we don’t know our history, we are doomed to learn “His-story!
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