Let’s start with a city we all know…that is famous for major daily traffic jams: Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States. Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, even though there’s a 12‑to‑14‑lane mega highway which, in theory, connects the city’s north to its south. The truth is that this mega highway around the city regularly has three‑mile‑long traffic jams that last four hours or more. The assumption is that commuters are stuck there because some city planner made a mistake, but the heavy congestion stems from one glaring fact. In Atlanta, as in dozens of cities across America, daily congestion is a direct consequence of a century‑long effort to segregate the races. Even though the federal government paid for most of the creation of the Interstate highway system during the 1950s and 1960s, local officials had a lot of power in determining the path of urban freeways, and they did so with segregation as the primary reason behind the pathways of these urban freeways.
As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta — local expressways at first, then Interstates — were steered along routes that bulldozed ‘blighted’ neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities,” according to Kevin Kruse, who wrote extensively on the segregationist purposes of 20th century urban freeway planning. The story is repeated in other cities like Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Richmond, and Tampa, but also other cities around the country, like Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Washington DC.
Interstates were a tool of urban renewal, destroying black and low-income neighborhoods, but also as a toll of segregation. Kruse explains:
“Today, major roads and highways serve as stark dividing lines between black and white sections in cities like Buffalo, Hartford, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear. Interstate 20, the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta’s center, was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as “the boundary between the white and Negro communities” on the west side of town.”
For much of the nation’s history, the campaign to keep African‑Americans“ in their place” manifested socially and politically in an effort to keep them quite literally in one place or another. Before the Civil War, white masters kept enslaved African‑Americans close at hand to coerce their labor and guard against revolts. But with the abolition of slavery, the spatial relationship was reversed.
Once they had no need to keep constant watch over African‑Americans, whites wanted them out of sight. Civic planners, especially after WWII, pushed them into ghettos, and the segregation we know today became the rule. At first the rule was overt, as Southern cities like Baltimore and Louisville enacted laws that mandated residential racial segregation. Such laws were eventually invalidated by the Supreme Court in the 1920s, but later measures achieved the same effect by more subtle means. During the New Deal, federal agencies like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration stated that explicitly marked minority neighborhoods were risky investments and therefore bank loans, mortgages and insurance should not be made in those areas. Other policies simply targeted black communities for isolation and demolition. The postwar programs for urban renewal, for instance, destroyed black neighborhoods and displaced their residents with such regularity that African‑Americans came to believe, in what James Baldwin famously stated that “Urban renewal means Negro removal.”
As an example of how this type of segregation is still going on to this day, in 2019 Gwinnett Co. voted MARTA (Atlanta’s metro system) down for the third time. Supporters had hoped that changes in the county’s racial composition, which is becoming less white, might make a difference, but the initiative failed by an 8pt. margin. Officials discovered that some nonwhite suburbanites shared the isolationist instincts of earlier white suburbanites. One white property manager in her late 50s told a reporter that she voted against mass transit because it was used by poorer residents and immigrants, whom she called “illegals.” “Why should we pay for it?” she asked. “Why subsidize people who can’t manage their money and save up a dime to buy a car?”
Sources:
The 1619 Project: How Segregation caused Your Traffic Jam: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html
The Deliberate Segregation of US Cities:
The Historical Memory Recovery Channel 