How Highways Helped Drive America’s Racial Divide
Interstate highways weren’t always paved with good intentions
One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Transportation launched “Reconnecting Communities,” a five-year pilot program promising to invest $1 billion to help “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.”
US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (D-Indiana) said at that time:
“We can’t ignore the basic truth: that some of the planners and politicians behind those projects built them directly through the heart of vibrant populated communities. Sometimes as an effort to reinforce segregation. Sometimes because the people there have less power to resist. And sometimes as part of a direct effort to replace or eliminate Black neighborhoods.”
How did building the country’s interstate highway system take such a wrong turn?
A noble goal
The notion of a transcontinental highway had been discussed decades earlier, but it wasn’t until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, passed under the Eisenhower Administration, that things got serious. That bill authorized the construction of some 41,000 miles of an interstate highway system.
