Where were going we dont need roads
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In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to ensure the safety of the Little Rock Nine, first African Americans to enroll at Arkansas’s famed Central High School. The school was desegregated, with violence avoided.
But city fathers weren’t amused. They began work on an urban highway that would bisect Little Rock along its west-east axis, with the mainly black neighborhoods of the south side physically separated from affluent mainly white neighborhoods – and the state capitol building – to the north.
The highway, federal route 630 – paid for with federal funds – was “below grade,” sunk into a deep ditch. A moat, except with Buicks instead of alligators.
There were bridges over Highway 630, and of course anyone could use the bridges. But whites were a lot more likely than blacks to have cars.
Couldn’t you just walk across? Years ago in Little Rock, I decided to see what it felt like to walk across one of the bridges spanning Highway 630, starting on the black side and going toward the white north.
I didn’t get far. I was seized with utter dread. The bridge walkway did not have guard rails. Just a little metal up to the knee. Anyone walking the bridge who stumbled would plummet to death among speeding cars.
This was not a civil-engineering oversight. This was deliberate – to frighten people who did not own cars away from using the bridges.
Over two decades following the Little Rock Nine, highways were built through many city centers, usually by exercising eminent domain to demolish black homes and businesses, then wall off black from white neighborhoods.
Planners began to say highway construction could be a tool against “urban blight,” which as August Wilson showed in his 2005 play Radio Golf, was always code for black neighborhoods.
In Atlanta, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Fresno, Kansas City, Los Angeles and other cities, highways were lain to separate black from white. Most of the tab was paid by federal taxpayers.
The Kensington Expressway, cut through Buffalo neighborhoods. Photo by Derek Gee of the Buffalo News, who excels at drone photography.
This wasn’t some secret. From the Oval Office in 2021, President Joe Biden denounced a federally supported urban highway that cut off the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. The timely and important new book City Limits by Megan Kimble (Crown) details how Texas state officials designed urban highways for Austin, Dallas and Houston to speed commuting on the one hand, to destroy or isolate black neighborhoods on the other.
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