Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways

When the U.S. interstate system was constructed, spurred by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, many highways were purposefully routed through Black, Brown, and poor communities. These neighborhoods were destroyed, isolated from the rest of the city, or left to deteriorate over time.
 
Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff, Justice and the Interstates examines the toll that the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System has taken on vulnerable communities over the past seven decades, details efforts to restore these often- segregated communities, and makes recommendations for moving forward. It opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on engineers, urban planners, transportation professionals, and policymakers to account for the legacies of their practices.
 
The chapters, written by diverse experts and thought leaders, look at different topics related to justice and the highway system, including:

• A history of how White supremacists used interstate highway routing in Alabama to disrupt the civil rights movement
• The impact of the highway in the Bronzeville area of Milwaukee
• How the East Los Angeles Interchange disrupted Eastside communities and displaced countless Latino households
• Efforts to restore the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul 

Justice and the Interstates provides a concise but in-depth examination of the damages wrought by highway construction on the nation’s communities of color. Community advocates, transportation planners, engineers, historians, and policymakers will find a way forward to both address this history and reconcile it with current practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642832624

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Justice and the Interstates

THE RACIST TRUTH ABOUT URBAN HIGHWAYS

Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca C. Retzlaff

Washington

Covelo

© 2023 Ryan Reft, Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca C. Retzlaff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943479

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Keywords: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO); Baltimore, Maryland; Birmingham, Alabama; car dependency; civic engagement; community participation; Federal-Aid Highway Act; Houston, Texas; the Interstate Highway Act; Los Angeles, California; Memphis, Tennessee; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Montgomery, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; public participation; racism; redlining; St. Paul, Minnesota; transportation engineers; transportation justice; transportation planning; urban expressway; US Department of Transportation (USDOT)

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-262-4 (electronic)

From Ryan Reft

To Soo

From Amanda Phillips de Lucas

To Juan and Brioche

From Rebecca Retzlaff

To Clover, Maple, Juniper, and Pearl

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction. How Can a Highway Be Racist?

Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff

Part I. Mythologies

Chapter 1. The Myth and the Truth about Interstate Highways

Sarah Jo Peterson

Chapter 2. The Interstates, Racism, and the Need for Truth and Reconciliation: The Case of Highway Routing in Alabama

Rebecca Retzlaff and Jocelyn Zanzot

Chapter 3. Overton Park: The Race and Class Politics of Environmentalism, Historic Preservation, and Highway Construction

Ryan Reft

Part II. Methods

Chapter 4. Milwaukee’s Freeway Fights: Lessons from Building and Rebuilding

Ruben L. Anthony Jr. and Joseph Rodriguez

Chapter 5. The Perils of Civic Participation: Community Engagement and Interstate Planning in Baltimore

Amanda Phillips de Lucas

Chapter 6. Right in the Way: Generations of Highway Impacts in Houston

Kyle Shelton

Chapter 7. Latino Interchanges: Greater East Los Angeles in the Freeway Era

Gilbert Estrada and Jerry González

Part III. Momentum

Chapter 8. A Contemporary Path to Transportation Justice in Rondo

Tierra Bills

Chapter 9. Guerrilla in the Room

Amy Stelly

Conclusion. Never Again Is Now: The Transportation Professions’ Responsibility to Work Toward Justice

Steven Higashide

Notes

About the Contributors

Index

Preface

The origins of this book emerged from an idea by Sarah Jo Peterson for a series of articles in The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, dedicated to exploring racial injustice and the Interstate Highway System. Peterson and Ryan Reft, co-editor of The Metropole, solicited articles and encouraged authors to write whatever they thought would lead to productive discussions about the need for truth and accountability over racial injustice and the Interstate Highway System.

The series of articles was very popular, receiving hundreds of retweets in the first few weeks alone. Twelve days into the start of the series, secretary of the US Department of Transportation Pete Buttigieg tweeted about justice and the US Interstate Highway System, Let me be clear: American highways were too often built through Black neighborhoods on purpose—dividing communities, adding pollution, and making pedestrians less safe, echoing the premise of the blog series, we must face these facts in order to fix them.

That series of articles opened up new areas of historical inquiry while also calling on policymakers, engineers, and planners to acknowledge and account for the legacies of the Interstate Highway System over the past seven decades. The original articles on the blog were built around the decisions leading to the dislocation of people and their homes, businesses, and community institutions by the construction and routing of the Interstate Highway System. The articles confront dislocation and also bring in additional topics, showing the way to even richer and deeper conversations about justice and the Interstates. The authors hoped that their work would lead to continued development of accountability in public policy, the highway industry, and the transportation and urban planning professions.

Reft later received an email from Island Press editor Heather Boyer, inquiring about the possibility of turning the series of articles into an edited volume. Reft and Peterson approached a few of the authors about co-editing the volume, and Amanda Phillips de Lucas and Rebecca Retzlaff agreed. The co-authors, Reft, Phillips de Lucas, and Retzlaff, asked the original authors to expand on their pieces and also approached additional authors to contribute new pieces that would add depth to the book. The chapters in the book are organized around three major themes: mythologies, methods, and momentum.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sarah Jo Peterson, who had the initial idea for the series of blog posts on racial justice and the Interstate Highway System in The Metropole. Peterson’s original piece, The Myth and the Truth about Interstate Highways, which has been revised and now appears as chapter 1 of this book, on the need to confront and understand the myth surrounding the racist history of the Interstate Highway System, was the initial organizing principle around which all other blog posts were based and provided the conceptual framework for the three themes of this book: mythologies, methods, and momentum. We are also grateful to The Metropole and the Urban History Association for hosting the initial series of articles.

We are also thankful for the assistance of our editor at Island Press, Heather Boyer, for her support, encouragement, and assistance with getting this book into print. We are also grateful to Heather for her help with identifying additional authors for the book. We particularly thank the authors who contributed chapters for this volume: Ruben L. Anthony Jr., Tierra Bills, Gilbert Estrada, Jerry González, Joseph Rodriguez, Kyle Shelton, Amy Stelly, and Jocelyn Zanzot. Though she did not contribute to this volume, we also extend thanks to Danielle Wiggins for her contribution to the original series. We are also grateful to Steven Higashide, who contributed the conclusion for the book by providing incisive insight into the significance of the chapters and ideas for a path forward toward justice and healing of the harms of the Interstate Highway System.

We are grateful for the libraries that provided photographs and images for this text, including the Public Roads Administration, Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Montgomery County Archives, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Detroit Publishing Co. Photograph Collection, the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress, Nathaniel Alexander Owings Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Citizens Planning & Housing Association, Kyle Shelton, California Highways and Public Roads, ReConnect Rondo, Ramsey County Historical Society, Amy Stelly, and Stop TxDOT I-45.

Finally, we thank our families, friends, students, colleagues, and communities, who continue to give us inspiration and hope for the future for transportation justice.

INTRODUCTION

How Can a Highway Be Racist?

Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff

DURING AN EARLY 2022 PRESS CONFERENCE, Florida governor and prominent Republican Ron DeSantis criticized President Biden’s infrastructure bill. He decried its funding for what he viewed as items or programs unrelated to infrastructure, such as rectifying past injustices or adding trees and speed cameras, the latter dismissed by the governor as a further extension of the surveillance state. He lamented, They’re saying that highways are racially discriminatory, I don’t know how a road can be that. This is the woke-ification of federal policy.¹

In a sense, DeSantis was correct; the physical highway has no agency. It’s simply a road. However, the forces that placed it there and the consequences that resulted from such decisions are inextricably connected to race. The interstate highway system stands as a . . . physical realization of our racialized norms and values, argues civil rights lawyer and law professor Deborah Archer. Highways were built through and around black communities to physically entrench racial inequality and protect white spaces and privilege. The moment the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed into law, working- and middle-class Black and Latino communities, already vulnerable due to various federal, state, and municipal policies, were in a more precarious position. Decades of federal, local, and state housing legislation undermined housing and economic opportunities for Blacks and Latinos. Racist transportation policies and infrastructure limited mobility for people of color.

Interstate Highways are just one part of America’s racist history of travel. Beginning with stagecoaches and steamboats, and moving to railroad stations, roadside rest stops, train cars, buses, and Interstate Highways, America’s transportation network has always been defined by race and exclusion. As historian Mia Bay notes, although mobility is viewed as a core and intrinsic American value, it has never been equal: American identity has long been defined by mobility and freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom. . . . As new modes of transportation and accommodations developed, new forms of segregation followed.²

Racial zoning maps adopted by municipalities across the United States in the early twentieth century, legitimized by state enabling legislation and state and federal court decisions, established legal boundaries of segregated neighborhoods. Co-locating those segregated neighborhoods with heavy industrial use zoning entrenched environmental justice problems for decades. Infrastructure disinvestment in those neighborhoods was followed by the passage of local housing policies that targeted the homes within them for demolition because of a lack of critical infrastructure such as water and sewerage that municipalities refused to provide. The Federal Housing Administration’s institutionalization of redlining, a practice that purposely denied federal home loans to non-White communities, further inscribed segregation into the landscape and robbed families of generational wealth. Increasing numbers of residents moving to metropolitan areas and the limited housing stock available because of segregation led to overcrowding and exacerbated the wear and tear on communities and homes. Unable to secure loans for upkeep and maintenance and denied equal access to education and employment, Black and Latino urban neighborhoods witnessed declining property values and residential decline. A discourse of devaluation followed, labeling such communities slums, making them ripe for urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, which intertwined with highway construction to decimate the lives of families living in these metropolitan areas. Highway construction devastated numerous White working-class communities as well, but Black and Latino neighborhoods bore a far greater brunt of the Interstate’s destructive force and enjoyed far fewer options than their White counterparts to access housing, transportation, and economic opportunity.

Highways represented modernity, and through slum clearance their construction swept away the vestiges of the old while endeavoring to blaze a new path to urban prosperity. The construction of these modernist projects simultaneously devastated residents in places like Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, California, the Fifth Ward in Houston, Texas, the Bronx in New York, and Rondo in St. Paul, Minnesota, all described in this book, among countless others.³ With the conclusion of the Interstate Highway System’s construction in the early 1970s, federal, state, and municipal planners and engineers had restructured American cities by displacing over 475,000 households and more than one million people. Residents, predominantly Black, Latino, and poor, who remained often did so in hollowed out communities.⁴

The Interstate Highway Act imposed a new set of federal design standards that prioritized maximum traffic flow, demanding wider freeways with more lanes, elaborate interchanges, and straighter lines that cut incisively into the urban fabric, unlike the earlier generation of state and municipal highways that snaked their way through the city’s older neighborhoods, writes historian Eric Avila. During this period planners and engineers promoted a technocratic approach couched in technical jargon and scientific language that, though undoubtedly precise in its coordinates and angles, obscured the racial implications of its policies and insulated the profession from public accountability.⁵ In Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley used funding from the 1956 act to construct the Dan Ryan Expressway, purposely rerouting it into a classic barrier between the black and white south side, along Wentworth Avenue.⁶ Daley may have pioneered this policy, but many others emulated it in his wake. As contributor Sarah Jo Peterson notes in chapter 1, by the mid-1950s they were very aware of highways’ impact on urban neighborhoods, even though in subsequent decades officials gradually erased this version of the Interstate’s history. Despite this awareness, federal policies failed to account for and provide adequate support or housing for the displaced.

Yet if mayors and city councils provided the political cover for such policies and planners and engineers promoted a dubious history of the Interstate, the general public bought into a narrative that promoted car travel and obscured its costs, in large part, due to the growing popularity of and dependence on automobility. By 1971, Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell recognized the centrality of automobiles in daily life, arguing, losing one’s driver license is more serious for some individuals than a stay in jail.⁷

The Mythology, Methods, and Momentum of the Interstate Highway System

In a November 2021 White House press briefing, US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg addressed the need to confront the racist history of the Interstate Highway System, noting, I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality. And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it.⁸ Secretary Buttigieg, like many of the authors in this volume, points out several important questions: What do we have to lose by not confronting the truth of the injustices of the Interstate Highway System? And what will we gain by confronting the truth? The authors of this volume look at what we have to gain by confronting the truth and how can we move toward reparative justice for the harms done to Black and Brown communities that were, and continue to be, injured by the enduring injustices of the Interstate Highway System.

Image: This map, produced by the Public Roads Administration in 1947, served as the blueprint for construction of the Interstate Highway System, created with the passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. National Interstate System Map 1947. (Photo Credit: Public Roads Administration, August 2, 1947)

This map, produced by the Public Roads Administration in 1947, served as the blueprint for construction of the Interstate Highway System, created with the passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. National Interstate System Map 1947. (Photo Credit: Public Roads Administration, August 2, 1947)

Through this volume, we have sought to engage in a dialogue to advance the discussion and truth-telling regarding the history of the Interstate Highway System. The authors have analyzed the racism of the Interstate Highway System from multiple lenses and perspectives. Some of the authors are academics, who offer archival research on Interstate Highway planning and routing. Other authors are professionals, who view the harms of the Interstate Highway System from the practical lens of working in planning and engineering practice today. Some of the authors are former municipal officials, who have a unique perspective on the role of policy and politics in shaping the Interstate Highway System. Other authors are community activists, who live in close proximity to the enduring harms of the Interstate Highway System and continue to work on the ground organizing residents, repairing communities, and enacting justice.

The contributors of this volume challenge the mythology of the Interstate Highway System: the myth that the effects of the highways on cities and Black and Brown neighborhoods were an unintended byproduct of routing the highways through cities. These cases shed light on the structural and institutional racism, and in some cases personal racist beliefs, that were embedded in decisions to route the Interstate Highways away from wealthy White neighborhoods and through or adjacent to neighborhoods that were home to people of color. The authors of the book confront the reality that urban Interstates destroyed vibrant neighborhoods that were home to Black and Brown people in many cities, disconnected them from White neighborhoods and downtown districts, demolished neighborhood business districts and small businesses that were fundamental to many neighborhoods and families, and have lasting impacts on public health, livability, and community development. The public officials charged with protecting the public instead intentionally constructed urban Interstates that further segregated cities and harmed residents.

The authors of the book also challenge the methods and practices that were used by planners, engineers, and policymakers, which led to the injustices of the Interstate Highway System. The volume highlights policy failures embedded in the initial legislation creating the Interstate Highway System, such as the lack of requirements for citizen participation, limited or inaccessible methods for responding to citizen concerns, inadequate relocation assistance, and incomplete linkages to local planning. The failures in methods, practices, and policies included an overreliance on outdated rational planning models, even from a 1960s perspective, which gave highway planning the appearance that it was a technical and scientific endeavor when it was, and continues to be, a highly political act. Court challenges, though bringing some relief to community and environmental activists and historic preservationists, also failed to address issues of race embedded in the construction of the Interstates.

As a path forward, the authors of the book consider momentum toward truth-telling and recognition of harms by investigating contemporary efforts to restore community, vibrancy, and confront justice in the present-day Interstate Highway System. The authors describe resilient people in urban neighborhoods who spend their lives proximate to Interstate Highways, working and fighting for reparations, while continuing to use the space under and around the concrete plinths displaying the decaying monuments of racist planning.

Telling the truth about racial injustice and the Interstate Highway System recognizes the fact that politics