Link to the full January-April 2025 issue here.
by Karilyn Crockett
In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education decision to outlaw “separate but equal” doctrine energized civil rights strategists. The following year, forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus and helped launch a 381-day boycott that successfully integrated the city’s public bus system. This victory prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to found a new, regional civil rights organization. Initially called the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-violent Integration and later renamed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this organization took aim at racially segregated bus systems in the American south. King and his allies understood transportation access as both a test of and frontier for legal citizenship for Black Americans. By targeting access to transportation infrastructure, King and Parks followed in the footsteps of a long line of activists including Louisiana’s Homer Plessy. When Plessy lost his judicial appeal to sit in a white railway car in 1896, he set in motion a range of legal and direct action strategies that defined the modern civil rights movement.
Against this backdrop,1960s-era interstate highway projects and the revolts they spurred take on renewed meaning and force. Citizen-led freeway revolts began in San Francisco in the 1950s and soon seized cities in every region of the country. By 1967, the newly created Federal Highway Administration began to track a rising number of highway controversies plaguing its staff. From displacing historic urban populations to creating traffic-choked roadways and empty downtown cores, America’s mid-twentieth century roadbuilding campaign violently reorganized cities and precipitated many population-level harms that remain unresolved today. Local opposition to interstate highway plans erupted in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Miami, Boston, Memphis and Houston.
Although President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act offered cities near limitless funding for their interstate highways, this period’s auto-centered exuberance yielded a shrinking set of housing and employment options for residents of cities. The interstate highway system’s 40,000 miles, later expanded to 42,000 miles, destroyed entire neighborhoods and subverted a younger generation’s hope for racial, economic and political integration. By the early 1960s, federal highway construction and urban renewal demolitions were displacing more than 70,000 families, mostly non-white, from their homes annually (Mohl, 42). Scholars estimate that between 1959 and mid-1971 more than one million individuals were displaced by urban renewal alone. Of these displaced individuals, 60 percent were non-white (Pfau, Lawlor, Hochfelder and Sewell, 2024). These figures signify the demographic impact of a hostile and racist vortex of urban dislocation just as the majority of Black families and workers move into U.S. cities.
Tom Lewis, Raymond Mohl, Mindy Thompson Fullilove and others have documented the history of U.S. highway expansion and its disproportionate negative effects on African American and working class urban populations. Often more than single-issue fights to halt interstate roads, many anti-highway campaigns were rooted in traumatic memories of previous displacement, what Mindy Thompson Fullilove has termed “rootshock.” Whether citizen opposition to highways erupted as large-scale protests or more muted forms of dissent, this period marks an existential crisis for urban residents fighting not only against highways but for housing, jobs and space.
Highway plans joined a bevy of national and local policies that prioritized the housing, employment and consumer needs of middle class white Americans and the downtown and suburban landscapes built for them. The lasting result was a federally-subsidized pattern of white homogeneity unfurled through roads, single-family homes and suburban office parks built at dizzying speeds and scales. These new landscapes further codified racial segregation for a generation of Americans who witnessed many of the civil rights movement’s seminal battles and victories.
A tale of two cities – freeway opposition in New Orleans and Boston
New Orleans
In 1960 the City of New Orleans seized land in the Tremé neighborhood to construct an extension of the I-10 highway. Considered the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, the Tremé is further distinguished by its history of land ownership by free people of color and later formerly enslaved Africans beginning in the 1800s. Notably, the Tremé was home to civil rights pioneer Homer Plessy. The 1966 arrival of the 1-10 interstate highway leveled Claiborne Avenue and decimated the Tremé’s cultural and commercial core. Famed highway builder Robert Moses had planned a previous road, the Riverfront Expressway, to cut through the French Quarter, but a coalition of well-connected preservationists and white residents successfully defeated that plan. Residents of the Tremé were not so fortunate. There were not yet federal laws requiring public meetings for highway projects so many Tremé residents reported that they were unaware of the highway plan. In a quick sequence of events more 200 towering oak trees, 100 businesses and 100 homes were ripped from the center of the neighborhood and replaced by concrete. As news of the highway plan began to circulate, local members of the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP had been engaged in a multi-year boycott of New Orleans’ downtown segregated retailers. The boycott began when five Black and two white university students staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on September 9, 1960 to protest the store’s refusal to serve Black students. The demonstration grew to include a picket line stretching seven blocks and a 35 store boycott. When residents learned what was happening in the Tremé, they voiced their opposition to the highway. But it was too late. Tremé’s heart was gone. For some residents, the national fight against racial segregation had diverted their attention to a proposed highway plan that sounded abstract until it wasn’t. Many former residents recall this period with a mix of anger and grief. Residents remain outraged by the city’s decision to demolish the Claiborne Avenue commercial district and place an elevated highway through the Tremé. Reeling from their failed efforts to stop the road, residents launched the Tremé Community Improvement Association as a resident advocacy organization.
Boston, MA
Whereas Black residents in New Orleans were not able to stop I-10’s devastating arrival, Black activists in Boston joined a multi-racial coalition and defeated the urban expansion of I-95 in 1972. The interstate and its Inner Belt threatened vibrant Boston neighborhoods in Roxbury, the South End, Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park as well as Cambridge, Somerville and beyond. Greater Boston’s highway battle was a late addition to the nation’s cauldron of freeway revolts. For many years the city of Cambridge remained the hold out vote needed to advance Massachusetts’ highway plans. A quirk in state law required unanimous agreement of state legislators whose districts were crossed by the proposed highway projects. A single veto by any affected municipality halted construction. For years, Cambridge maintained the sole “no” vote until state law was repealed in 1965; and Cambridge lost its veto power. With thousands of homes and businesses now under immediate threat, a grassroots movement of citizen protests erupted. A group of Cambridge Italian, Greek, French and Black residents, students, radical planners and clergy began a movement that seemed all but doomed.
But by the late 1960s the combined fury of the civil rights, Black Power and anti-war movements had matured to produce a cadre of seasoned activists. A younger generation of Black activists called for a more radical movement based on the political principles of community control and nationalist self-determination. Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Boston chapters of the Black United Front and the Black Panther Party rose to prominence and advanced an urban agenda based on devolved decision-making and insurgent planning. Both organizations protested I-95 and its impact on Boston’s Black residents. A close friendship between Chuck Turner, a local leader of the regional coalition to stop the highway, and Stokely Carmichael, former chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party, proved pivotal to Boston’s anti-highway organizing tactics. In 1969, Black nationalists joined with thousands of residents, students and activists from Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and surrounding suburbs to march to the state house to demand the road be halted. Increasingly loud calls for local control coupled with new federal environmental policy (the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969) that required advanced notice for public meetings and environmental impact statements for federally funded projects had shifted the political calculus, and in December 1972 Governor Francis Sargent killed the project.
Freeway revolts, Act 2 – Decommissioning
When the interstate highway system was declared complete in 1992, several hundred miles of federal roads had already been decommissioned for various reasons including replacement by mass transit as enabled by Section 137(b) of the 1973 Federal-Aid Highway Act. Yet, in the early 2000s multiple mid-sized cities questioned the centrality of metropolitan highways and launched new plans to decommission them. This wave of highway removals has revived old questions about the necessity of running interstate highways through urban centers while further stoking long-time residents who remember the bruising initial construction of these roads. As cities like Minneapolis (I-94) and New Orleans (I-10) advocate for removal of multi-lane highways that have damaged largely Black neighborhoods, other cities like Akron, Syracuse, and Rochester, NY have already begun demolition of their historic interstates.
Rochester, NY
As Rochester’s African American population tripled in size between 1950 and 1960, a strong cultural and social hub was built in the Third and Seventh Wards. The Third Ward’s Clarissa Street neighborhood anchored a bustling commercial corridor; however, its residents were largely excluded from Rochester’s twentieth century economic growth. Decades of racially discriminatory lending, infrastructure development, employment and real estate practices solidified generational wealth building for Rochester’s white business leaders and landowners and kept the city’s downtown core a racially and spatially segregated landscape. By the 1960s, Rochester’s business and political leaders chased the dream of a federally-funded highway as a bulwark for the city’s economic fortunes. Interstate 490 was proposed as the solution for luring suburban and increasingly affluent, white shoppers and workers back to downtown. Although this 2.7 mile ring road was fiercely protested by African-American residents living along its projected route, the routing of the Inner Loop through the Third & Seventh Ward neighborhoods destroyed the few institutional and wealth-building gains secured by African-Americans in the Clarissa Street neighborhood.
In 2014, Rochester’s city leaders announced a plan to remove the Inner Loop and reconnect neighborhoods once bisected by the road. This decision signaled a historic reversal and the rise of new planning paradigms emphasizing connectivity, mobility and equity. One Rochester official stated: “This is not just transportation. This is not just community development. It is focused on racial equity and healing old wounds and making sure that current residents and residents that were displaced will benefit” (Brian Sharp, Democrat & Chronicle 10/13/21).
But long before the city of Rochester removed its Inner Loop, former residents of the Clarissa Street neighborhood began hosting a yearly reunion to reclaim space, memories and relationships lost beneath the city’s downtown highway. Formed in 1996, the Clarissa Street Reunion Committee began as a volunteer effort to connect past and present Black Rochester residents. Each summer for nearly 30 years, Clarissa Street residents have gathered to share family memories, enjoy sizzling barbecues and listen to updates on each other’s lives. Clarissa Street Reunion Committee leaders like Katherine Sprague Dexter, whose family anchors five generations of African American presence in Rochester, remember the violent period of removals and have pledged to demand redress. Through annual gatherings, storytelling and a collaboration with local teenagers to produce a documentary film, Ms. Dexter and her neighbors have rallied to preserve the history of the Clarissa Street neighborhood while planning the city’s highwayless future. Some residents who remember life before the Inner Loop was built have grown skeptical of urban design visions that they believe do not reflect their current needs or address past collective losses.
Buoyed by federal, state and city funding, Rochester is working to address its mid-twentieth century planning failures by developing new plans that better reflect the needs of current and long-time residents. In reference to the Inner Loop’s removal, a manager for the city of Rochester remarked, “Equity is huge on this…This is not just transportation. This is not just community development. It is focused on racial equity and healing old wounds and making sure that current residents and residents that were displaced will benefit” (Brian Sharp, Democrat and Chronicle, 10-13-21). Although the term equity has become a lightning rod in federal government circles, it is policy shorthand for a commitment to break from past processes and policies that delivered benefits to some populations and disproportionate harms to others. For equity planning to fulfill its meaning, cities like Rochester engaged in large-scale transportation infrastructure development and repair must center those populations most negatively affected by past planning projects. These projects have caused lasting generational harm and attempts at population-level repair must consider social and cultural interventions alongside physical design goals. As mayors in cities like Rochester and New Orleans engage in contemporary reckonings with their interstate highways and the painful histories they symbolize, planners, elected officials and business leaders have an opportunity to show that they have learned these lessons.
References
Avila, E. (2014). The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt6wr7hb
Biles, R., Mohl, R. A., & Rose, M. H. (2014). Revisiting the Urban Interstates: Politics, Policy, and Culture since World War II. Journal of Urban History, 40(5), 827-830. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144214533293 (Original work published 2014)
Hines, B. Miami Herald. March 21, 2024. “The bustling Overtown of my memory is gone. But has a comeback begun?”
Lewis, T. (2013). Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. Cornell University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1xx63t
Mohl, R. (2002). “The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt” Poverty & Race Research Action Council
O’Dwyer. K. & DeLucca, C. (2017). “Civil Rights Activists Protest Woolworth’s Department Store.” New Orleans Historical, Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans. Oral History Interviews.
Pfau, A., Lawlor, K., Hochfelder, D., & Sewell, S. K. (2024). Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 10(2), 113–131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48775327
PRRAC (2018). Deconstructing Segregation in Syracuse? The Fate of I-81 and the Future of One of New York State’s Highest Poverty Communities (Anthony Armstrong & Make Communities)
Thompson Fullilove, M. (2004). Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It. One World/Ballantine
Karilyn Crockett (kcrock@mit.edu) is Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy & Planning at MIT and the author of People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making (2018)
