Roots of Resistance

For almost 70 years, The Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was a key center for the city's black community.

Home to about 80% of the city's black residents, it was a bustling community with a flourishing middle class, vibrant cultural life and integrated schools.

But from 1956 to 1968, it was absolutely decimated to make way for the construction of Interstate 94.

More than 600 families in Rondo lost their homes and 300 businesses were completely shuttered.

And in Florida, around that same time, the building of I-95 displaced about 10,000 people living in a neighborhood called Overtown, which until then was the center of economic and cultural life for the black residents of Miami.

And in Maryland, a construction project that aimed to connect I-70 with I-83 and I-95 around Baltimore Central Business District caused the demolition of 971 homes and 62 businesses.

It displaced more than 1500 people and cut a huge gash through West Baltimore.

More specifically, the neighborhoods that were middle class and majority Black.

The thing is, the project was never even completed.

It's now locally known as the Highway to Nowhere.

So many cities across the country have their own versions of the same story.

So it kind of begs the question, are highways racist?

Before it became the backdrop for some road trip movies, van life Tik Toks, and the average American commute, the United States interstate highway system was just an idea, one that was popularized in 1939 at the New York World's Fair.

It was actually the subject of the fair's most popular exhibit, Futurama, which was a cross between an amusement ride and a pitch presentation, all organized and paid for by General Motors.

With Futurama GM modeled a system of high speed roadways that connected all of the contiguous United States.

It was a car forward vision of American cities, one that presented highways as markers of progress and an inevitable feature of the future.

But where exactly where they proposing that these highways would go?

On all express city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so rooted as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.

You see, even then, displacement was core to the whole system's design.

Given that this was 1939, at the end of the Great Depression, it's not hard to see why these dazzling aspirational visions of prosperous future might particularly be attractive to the American public.

But the highway system as we know it today still wouldn't come together for almost another 20 years after Futurama opened, partially because of World War II.

In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act authorized nearly $25 billion, or almost $300 billion today, over several years, to construct the interstate highway system.

At the time, it was the largest public works program in U.S. history.

The goal of the interstate highway system was to better connect cities and states throughout the country for supply chain efficiency, military readiness, and generally to facilitate cross-country travel.

And it did accomplish that.

But it also reinforced and sometimes even created social and cultural divisions in already established communities.

Remember, this was the 1950s before the Civil Rights Act, before the Voting Rights Act.

This was still a time of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation and the National Highway Project was part of a broader post-World War II endeavor that aimed to revitalize cities and slow the exodus of white people fleeing to the suburbs.

That effort was referred to as urban renewal, and it also included the Housing Act of 1949, which aimed to redevelop urban housing through a system of federal funding.

But what urban renewal ultimately did was disrupt the lives and destroy the homes of the low income Black and Brown people who were living in the cities targeted for redevelopment.

It's been estimated that between 1957 and 1977, more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide because of this federal roadway construction.

1 million people!

That's more than the total population of Austin, Texas.

And though Black Americans made up just under 11% of the U.S. population in 1960, they accounted for at least 55% of those who were displaced.

A significant portion of those displaced families were from New York, which today has more interstate highways than any other state.

And that's in part due to the work of just one man, Robert Moses.

Throughout his 40 plus years in unelected public office in New York, he developed a reputation as the state's master builder because of the immense control he exerted over public works.

He built highways, bridges, tunnels, public housing projects, and even sports venues, which generally privileged the state's wealthy white residents at the expense of Black and Brown families.

His infrastructure projects routinely destroyed low income communities.

In his own words, he felt that his categorical imperative was action to clear the slums.

So these new highways must go right through cities and not around them.

You see, to Moses, the forced displacement of families and destruction of once thriving neighborhoods was just part of the process.

Necessary even, as he once crudely compared it to breaking eggs in order to make an omlete.

From 1948 to 1972 the construction of his Cross Bronx Expressway, which cut through the Bronx from the Harlem River near Washington Heights, almost all the way to the Long Island Sound, displaced 60,000 New Yorkers, many of them Black and Puerto Rican.

And between 1937 and 1964, Moses's Brooklyn Queens Expressway sliced through low income neighborhoods from Red Hook to Greenpoint.

It broke up communities that were already racially integrated, creating divisions that weren't even there before.

And the influx of traffic spewed constant pollution into the air, which we now know can lead to chronic health problems like asthma and respiratory illness.

Robert Moses worked on the 1939 World's Fair, too.

In fact, he was vital in securing its location.

Moses wanted to convert a vast ash dump in Flushing Meadows, Queens, into a permanent park, and he saw the fair as an opportunity to realize that goal, though only some of the changes he made at that time actually stuck.

So when the 25th anniversary of the fair rolled around in 1964, Moses resurrected the project and tried again to make his vision for Flushing Meadows a lasting legacy.

But by then, New York and really the whole country was starting to look very different.

And community activism was on the rise.

There was so much money and attention being paid to the construction of the 1964 World's Fair.

Early estimates projected it would cost a half a billion dollars or over $5 billion today.

There were exhibits put together by Disney.

And President Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to deliver the keynote address.

But meanwhile, New York neighborhoods like Harlem in Bed Stuy were under-resourced and ignored.

The Brooklyn chapter of a civil rights group called Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, made a plan to protest the 1964 World's Fair.

This protest was in response to the city's funneling money to the fair without addressing the long standing issues afflicting Black and Puerto Rican people.

They planned to jam of traffic on all the highways leading up to the fair.

On its opening day, Brooklyn CORE wanted the protest to raise awareness about what Black and Brown New Yorkers had endured, such as slum housing, poor schools, employment discrimination and police brutality.

But backlash from the city, news media and the national CORE organization stopped the Brooklyn chapter's plan before it could be carried out.

See, despite the excitement that Futurama drummed up for a future full of highways, it really didn't take long for people to realize how destructive these roadways were to their communities and their health, particularly in and around cities.

Highway revolts cropped up across the country in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Boston, where residents fought plans for two fast highway extensions that threatened to slice through several greater Boston neighborhoods.

The grassroots resistance in Boston pulled together a broad coalition, one that was multiracial and included both urban and suburban residents.

They were civil rights activists, members of women's groups, urban planners, professors and environmentalists, all united in opposition to the plan to carve Boston up with concrete.

In 150 acres of developer land in the Roxbury Jamaica Plain area is going to be taken by this four lane highway.

We don't want it built and we're going to stop it.

148 00:08:36,098 --> 00:08:40,353 Boston's anti highway movement brought together the tactics of the civil rights movement with a new generation of urban planners who were concerned with the social and cultural implications of road infrastructure.

With the help of a group called Urban Planning Aid, residents educated themselves about the highway building plan to potential effects.

They brought alternate transportation solutions to the city government.

And they organized a rally on January 25th, 1969, that brought thousands of protesters to the steps of the Massachusetts State House.

They called it People before Highways Day.

Their collective resistance resulted in the full stoppage of the proposed highway projects.

And their efforts also helped secure federal funding to expand mass transit in Boston and build a central city park that residents and visitors still enjoy today.

By the early 1970s, the nationwide anti highway movement had managed to usher in a few important changes of national consequence at the federal level.

The highway revolt helped inspire a 1970 law that ensures that people have the opportunity to weigh in on projects that impact their health, homes and neighborhoods.

The National Environmental Policy Act.

The ACT also demands that environmental impact studies are conducted for every federal infrastructure project to make sure that any negative consequences are considered before a new project ever breaks ground.

While the Highway Revolt movement successfully brought local issues of displacement and community health to a national stage, many protests still failed to bring about the local changes they hoped for.

And it's no accident that the neighborhoods that were actually able to stop highways from being built tended to be wealthier and whiter because those communities had the means to organize and protest and had more political capital to face down power.

But in recent years, some lawmakers at the federal and local levels have started using their power to correct the ruin and loss that those early infrastructure projects cost.

Today, 11 acres of land in Boston's Jackson Square neighborhood that sat empty for years after the homes and businesses were demolished to make way for highways is now being rebuilt into 1400 new units of housing, including affordable homes.

And in 2021, President Joe Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law established provisions to grant communities across the country federal aid and technical support for projects aiming to remedy the systemic racism caused by disruptive transportation barriers.

As part of its Reconnecting Communities pilot program, the Department of Transportation issued a $2 million grant to West Baltimore to repair the destruction caused by the highway to nowhere.

So as we've discussed the history of building America's highways reveals that these structures and systems can benefit some while vastly burdening others.

In an effort to unite counties in the country, they can divide communities for the worst and often have.

I'm Felicia for the win.

Thanks for watching.

Routes of Resistance on PBS.