Link to the full January-April 2025 issue.
by Deborah N. Archer
Introduction
In 2019, nine-year-old Amira Johnson sat at her kitchen table with a pen and paper, determined to protect her great-grandmother’s home in Sandridge, South Carolina. The house had been in her family for generations, a cornerstone of the historically Black community founded by people once enslaved in Horry County. But that year, Amira learned that the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) planned to build a four-lane, high-speed road that would cut through Sandridge, swallowing homes, businesses, and pieces of history.
In her handwritten letter, Amira asked SCDOT to reconsider. “My great-grandma is 79 years old and has no bisnus moving,” she wrote. “If you were me, you would be mad because they are taking away your homes. Be fair for once in your life.” Her letter reminded SCDOT of South Carolina’s history of Black oppression, poignantly asking, “Did you know that Black people did not have freedom?”
Despite Amira’s plea and the outcry of other Sandridge residents, plans for the proposed Conway Perimeter Road are moving forward. Its impact on Sandridge will be devastating. Like so many Black communities before it, Sandridge stands to lose everything—its homes, its land, its connection to history, and the tight-knit community that generations of its residents fought to build.
The segregation and exclusion of predominantly Black communities is so common as to seem inevitable today. Of course, it is anything but. Defenders of the status quo often say that segregation is a product of millions of personal choices—that poor people made bad decisions, that Black people prefer to live near other Black people and white people prefer to live near other white people. Even when they acknowledge the prevalence of discrimination, they blame it on the actions of individual bad apples, shrugging their shoulders and bemoaning how difficult it is to change people’s hearts and minds. In this view, segregation is inevitable, and no amount of government intervention can make a difference.
In fact, government has made all the difference. When we expand our understanding of government-sponsored segregation beyond racial covenants and redlining, it is clear that it is not just the invisible lines created by local, state, and federal law that divide us. It is also the physical, literal lines running through and around our communities – lines that may seem innocuous, or merely practical or necessary, but that are part of the architecture of racial inequality. The nation’s transportation system is an essential element of that infrastructure.
The story of transportation in America is a paradox. Our highways, roads, and railroads represent progress and mobility. But they have also served as tools of displacement and exclusion. In the twentieth century, many city officials used transportation infrastructure as a powerful tool to enforce white supremacy; to ensure that some people and communities would benefit from economic investment, while others would be starved for economic opportunity. Some would have views of the skyline, waterfront, or parks, while others had front row seats to traffic racing along the overpass. Which side you were on was far too often determined by race.
Transportation, Race, and Place
You cannot separate the story of transportation in America from the story of American racism. Racism is about place on multiple levels. White supremacy depends on Black people knowing “their place” in the social hierarchy and staying there. It demands that Black people know and adhere to the constraints that it puts on their lives; and it enforces those limits, often brutally, when Black people resist. But one of the most effective means that white supremacy has of ensuring that Black people know their place socially is to keep them in their place physically. What better way to let people know that their lives are limited—that they can never be who they want to be—than by penning them in, constraining their movement, determining where they can and cannot live, or work, or walk, or rest, or play.
Indeed, far too much of the country’s transportation system has effectively been planned, funded, and operated to parcel access to jobs and opportunity along racial lines; to force communities of color to bear a disproportionate share of the harms that come with any construction project and to reap disproportionately few rewards; and help compound the physical and economic exclusion and isolation of predominantly Black communities. In his writing, W.E.B. DuBois often focused on what he called the color line, the role that race and racism play in dividing America. He understood the deep and reinforcing connections between race and space. In his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folks, DuBois wrote that “[u]sually in cities each street has its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close proximity.” Indeed, across the country there are streets more known for how they divide people by race rather than for how they connect. These are the physical manifestations of the color line. Such roads are ubiquitous, and yet we barely notice them.
Transportation is far more than a means of moving people back and forth. Transportation systems shape who is allowed to feel like they belong. They determine who enjoys access to the many opportunities that this country offers, who gets to live with safety and dignity, and conversely, who gets locked out and left behind. Transportation infrastructure is the infrastructure of equitable education. It is the infrastructure of good health and economic opportunity. Transportation infrastructure is also the infrastructure of a vibrant democracy. You cannot tell the story of America’s second reconstruction without mentioning the 1954 Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Riders who tested the right to interstate travel, or the protesters who took to the streets across the deep south marching for the right to vote. Black freedom fighters have long fought for the right to equitably use transportation, and they have long used transportation infrastructure as platforms to make their demands heard.
Although many groups have been harmed by highways and the like, and have stories to tell about the resulting devastation, Black people have had a unique experience. This fact stems from multiple causes: the distinctive historical relationship between Black people and transportation; the intentional racial discrimination that has driven transportation infrastructure development in Black communities; the layering of transportation infrastructure on top of decades of discriminatory housing laws, policies, and practices; and the stark second-class status of Black Americans that persists in other areas of American life to this day.
Defending Jim Crow
One reason why transportation infrastructure has proved such an important tool in white supremacy is that removing a physical barrier can be even harder than changing a segregationist law. As the judicial decisions and civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s made it more difficult to isolate Black communities using zoning laws and other regulations, urban planners turned to road construction, public transportation policy, and other physical tools to do the work of segregation they could no longer legally enforce. Those efforts kicked into high gear when the Court signaled the fall of segregation with Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954. The Interstate Highway Act, for example, presented many governors, mayors, and city planners with a means to fight back. Communities around the country began to rely on transportation infrastructure — highways, public transportation, roads, and sidewalks — to do the work of oppression.
The nation’s interstate highway system’s routes were built against the backdrop of the massive resistance to integration that Brown inspired. Celebrated as a feat of engineering and a driver of American economic growth, interstate highways were often built over Black neighborhoods—destroying homes, businesses, communities, and lives. These practices were intentional, reflecting a broader pattern of prioritizing white suburbanites over Black urban communities. By the time Congressional hearings on the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which facilitated creation of the highway system, began, the modern civil rights movement and the pro-segregation resistance that it inspired were both in full swing. The highway system could have been constructed to further the promise of Brown. Instead, it be-came an essential element of the re-segregationist opposition.
The newly built highways facilitated flight of white Americans to growing, whites-only, suburbs. They would also restructure the urban communities those new suburbanites left behind. The interstate highway system was not built on a blank slate; its spurs were routed through existing neighborhoods. In 2017, the United States Department of Transportation estimated that more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide as a direct result of the original construction of the highways. Millions of others were left in hollowed-out communities after the bulldozers finished their work. The neighborhoods that were destroyed, the families that were forced to move, and the communities that were physically quarantined, were overwhelmingly Black and poor. So, just as the interstate highway system aided the development of white suburbs, it drove the physical and economic destruction of Black communities.
Many predominantly Black neighborhoods were systematically sequestered because they lacked the power to effectively fight back, or because they were perceived as having too much power. In Birmingham, Alabama, officials used I-59 and I-65 to help maintain racial segregation. In 1926, Birmingham, like many other cities, adopted a racial zoning ordinance dividing the city into racial districts that required the legal separation of Black and white neighborhoods. Although the United States Supreme Court struck down racial zoning in 1917, Birmingham flouted the Court’s ruling and found a way to keep it going. It was not until 1950 that a federal appeals court struck down Birmingham’s racial zoning law. So, Birmingham officials—led by notorious segregationist “Bull” Connor—used the construction of I-59 and I-65 to advance their segregationist agenda, using the new highways in the same way they had previously used racial zoning lines. These highways were ultimately built along a route mirroring the zoning boundaries of the old racial zoning ordinance, creating a permanent buffer between white and Black communities.
The destruction of a Black community to make way for I-95 in the Overtown section of Miami, Florida provides an example of how construction of the interstate highway system was used to destroy vibrant and economically self-sufficient Black communities. I-95 tore through the center of Overtown, a large Black community then considered to be the center of economic and cultural life for Black people in Miami. The destruction of Overtown was the realization of a decades-long campaign by white business leaders to remove Black residents and claim that land to expand Miami’s central business district. By the late 1960s, Overtown was dominated by the highway; there was no evidence of why it was once called the Harlem of the South. No corner of Overtown was saved. They demolished homes, churches, apartment buildings and businesses. Although nearly 40,000 Black people lived in Overtown before the highway expansion, only about 8,000 remained in a hollowed-out community after the highway was built.
Finally, the construction of the highways upended Black communities by breaking them apart and destroying the social connections that give communities life. In Nashville, I-40 was built through the main Black business district which had been home to 128 Black-owned businesses. In addition to destroying most of those businesses, six Black churches were destroyed and fifty local streets were dead-ended. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every state has a story about a highway destroying a Black community or other community of color. Those communities and their residents bear the marks of decades of accumulated disadvantage—racial segregation, concentrated poverty, and economic isolation.
Although they may be the most familiar, highways were not the only transportation infrastructure coopted as tools of segregation and division. Like much of the nation’s interstate highway system, many roads were built as physical boundaries to shield white communities from Black people who wanted to break free of their Jim Crow confines. In cities around the country, governmental powers were deployed under the guise of urban planning and street safety to build roads and street grids that appeased the segregationist desires of white citizens. And, beyond acting as lines of demarcation that determined where and how people lived, roads and street grids were manipulated to complicate the process of traveling from Black neighborhoods to and through white ones, locking people in or shutting them out, or both. Like a board game that becomes ever more difficult to play with each roll of the dice, street grids were laid out in ways that restricted Black mobility.
For many urban planners, it was not enough to keep Black residential communities separate from white residential communities. They had to create obstacles to keep Black people from even getting close to where white people lived. The subtle and not-so-subtle uses of street-planning techniques included dead-ending streets; converting roads to one-way streets that repeatedly lead drivers away from white communities; turning through-streets into cul-de-sacs; changing the names of streets as they passed from white to Black communities; and refraining from paving streets as they approached racial boundaries. Sometimes, municipalities used subtle tactics to limit Black access. Other times, localities made no attempts to disguise the segregationist intent behind nominally race-neutral practices.
Evading the Reach of the Law
In many ways, these physical barriers have been more effective than purely legal barriers, because as hard as it is to change a racist law or discriminatory social norm, it can be even harder to tear down a highway or redesign a street grid. The racialization of transportation infrastructure has revealed both the power and limits of our civil rights laws. These are the laws we see as among the greatest achievements of the civil rights movement; laws sometimes referred to as constituting a Second Reconstruction. Yet the nefarious genius in using highways, roads, public transportation, and pedestrian infrastructure to cement racial inequality was the belief, on the part of planners, that the exclusionary impact of transportation infrastructure would both outlast existing laws that facilitated racial exclusion and skirt possible future laws that promoted integration. These predictions have proven to be largely correct.
American laws prohibiting racial discrimination in public decision-making often employ broad and powerful language that, in theory, cover racially oppressive transportation policy. The language of existing legislation should offer pathways to challenge the racial discrimination that has guided infrastructure decisions, and to challenge the decades of accumulated structural racial inequality that made Black communities the path of least resistance for planners and their bulldozers. In practice, however, the prevailing interpretations and applications of these laws by the federal courts have severely constrained those laws’ potential. Far too often courts have interpreted or applied the laws to limit their power within an ecosystem that gives undue deference to public officials, while placing undue burdens on community members who are challenging municipal actions. The courts have found that they can explain away stark racial disparities and evidence of intent to harm Black communities. Or, perhaps more accurately, they can explain away the intent to protect white communities at all costs.
Conclusion
There is an irony in all of this. Roads, highways, and public transportation investments have been instrumental in connecting far-flung communities to one another. The American economic engine, and the wealth and opportunity it has provided for generations, would not be possible without them. For many Americans, the open road is synonymous with freedom. But this nation’s transportation infrastructure was never intended to provide those opportunities to everyone.
From collapsing highways to pockmarked roads to unreliable and inadequate public transportation systems, the need to rebuild is manifest. Today, America’s transportation infrastructure is crumbling from age and underinvestment. The collapse of the Key Bridge in Maryland is but one stark example. Spatial racism persists of course, and Black lives, homes, and communities continue to be valued less than others. In a nation where political power is deeply intertwined with race and economic power, it is not surprising that Black communities continue to disproportionately bear the burden of transportation infrastructure development.
As we rebuild, we have a choice to make. We can exacerbate past harms by continuing to make choices that benefit some communities at the expense of others. Or we can choose a new path and use this opportunity to truly build America’s transportation infrastructure back better. But we cannot truly repair our infrastructure until we understand its troubling history.
Deborah Archer is the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law and the President of the ACLU (archerd@mercury.law.nyu.edu). This article is adapted from Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality by Deborah N. Archer. Copyright (c) 2025 by Deborah Archer. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.