Abstract
In their conception, execution, and effects, urban highways in the United States reflected and reinforced systemic racial injustices. At least among historians, this assessment is neither new nor controversial. By 1967, highway project opponents in Washington, D.C. were denouncing “White men's roads through black men's homes”. 1 In 1969, when bulldozers were still clearing whole city blocks to make room for new segments of the interstate highways, Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, condemned highway projects and their planners for “destroying black neighborhoods to make commuting faster and easier for white suburbanites”. 2
Young presented his assertion as a statement of self-evident fact. It is therefore striking that more than 50 years later, an anthology of articles on the history of urban highways in the USA would be subtitled The Racist Truth about Urban Highways—as if this history were unknown. Regrettably, however, we do need Justice and the Interstates, because over the decades following Young's candid condemnation, its validity has been occluded by later perceptions that the destruction was unintended, the accidental side effect of following the paths of least resistance. Of course, in the USA, where economic and political power largely excluded communities of color, the pathfinders of the paths of least resistance were white, and they blazed their trails through communities of color.
The editors of this collection have organized nine historical studies by three guiding themes: mythologies, methods, and momentum. According to the editors, the first three chapters question retrospective “mythologies” that promote “the idea that the destruction and marginalization of Black and Latino communities were unforeseen consequences” of the projects (17). In fact, they say, the effects were known and sometimes intended. In the chapter opening the section, Sarah Jo Peterson observes that official histories discounted abuses as mere side effects. In an article on highway planning in Alabama, Rebecca Ratzlaff and Jocelyn Zanzot connect routing decisions to a self-professed racist. Sam Engelhardt served in the Alabama legislature from 1950 to 1958; from 1959 to 1963, he was director of the Alabama State Highway Department. Ratzlaff and Zanzot demonstrate that Engelhardt's politically empowered racism guided his official decisions. As a whole, however, the book offers far more evidence that crude expediency guided the planning of US urban highways more than the “intentionally vindictive, violent, and racist” motives that Engelhardt espoused (35). Though the editors are at pains to stress intentional harm, most of the evidence the authors have assembled indicates a degree of indifference to the residents of eviscerated communities that is less intentional but no more defensible.
Project opponents sometimes succeeded, and the kinds of resistance that worked are revealing. In an article drawing illustrations from Memphis, San Antonio, and Nashville, Ryan Reft shows that influential white residents could invoke values such as historic preservation and environmental protection to stop or deflect projects, while Black residents typically could not enlist support for their own efforts to prevent community devastation. Communities of color did succeed in stopping some projects, at least in part—notably in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. Though one of the contributors examines the Baltimore example—in which residents stopped the highway only after the roadbuilders had already wrought extensive destruction—the book as a whole does not stress such success stories.
In the second section, called “Methods,” contributors consider how highway routes were selected. The editors stress that plans were “designed to maintain and strengthen White supremacy by inflicting trauma and fear upon the communities that were harmed” (81). The articles in this section, however, instead reflect a self-serving indifference to Black and Latino residents that was no less devastating to their communities. The editors’ thematic plan stresses a bipolar but one-sided struggle in which planners overpowered vulnerable communities, but the authors offer more pluralistic accounts in which the competition was complex and less predictable. In a study of East Los Angeles, Gilbert Estrada and Jerry González attribute devastation primarily to political exclusion and economic vulnerability. In an article on Milwaukee's urban highways, Ruben Anthony and Joseph Rodriguez show how growing opportunities for local contractors in devastated communities divided the opposition, thereby weakening resistance to the later road projects. Similarly, in chapters respectively about Baltimore and Houston, Amanda Phillips de Lucas and Kyle Shelton explain how community consultation, which purportedly empowered residents, actually thwarted or deflected opposition without accommodating community needs. As Shelton observes, consultation can avail little within the narrow parameters of highway engineering orthodoxy. These cases suggest that a paternalistic, pro forma appearance of community consultation could be as destructive in its effects as explicit hostility.
The final section of the book, “Momentum,” offers two studies of belated efforts to reverse the enduring damage. Tierra Bills considers restorative justice efforts in St. Paul, Minnesota, to repair the city's Rondo community, torn apart by Interstate 94. In a chapter about the Interstate 10 corridor in New Orleans, community advocate Amy Stelly of the Claiborne Avenue Alliance lays bare profound devastation and neglect while contending that some degree of repair is still feasible and therefore essential. Finally, in a conclusion, TransitCenter's Steven Higashide, author of Better Buses, Better Communities (Washington DC: Island Press, 2019), makes a plea for a “a truth and accountability project” (177) that would ensure that professionals take into account and remediate the persistent legacies of destructive projects.
The editors of Justice and the Interstates stress the overwhelming power of racist highway planners directed against disenfranchised targets. The contributing authors’ accounts are often largely consistent with this simplification, but they offer more revealing perspectives. The struggle, they demonstrate, was multidimensional. In a fourth section, additional contributors could have shown how the expertise that excused community destruction was, like the roads themselves, constructed by interest groups committed to expanding markets for concrete, asphalt, and motor vehicles. Such a section, in turn, would help readers recognize that to the roadbuilders, racism was more a useful convenience than an intention—and no less destructive for the difference. Without justification, their professional orthodoxies presumed that extensive urban highways were necessary, and would have to rip through cities wherever economic and political power permitted. Racism and economic inequalities divided and hobbled opposition that was otherwise capable of stopping destructive highway projects.
The nine contributions to Justice and the Interstates offer a uniquely valuable collective rejoinder to facile excuses, especially assertions that the obvious injustices we see today were any less obvious when the projects were planned and built. We need this book because policmakers, experts, and the public have not yet had an honest reckoning with the histories it tells. For this reason, destructive projects persist. As Kyle Shelton observes in his contribution, the current North Houston Highway Improvement Project continues today the abuses of two generations past; comparable examples can be found wherever growth still excuses reflexive roadbuilding in the vain pursuit of making car dependency work, even in cities. As long as this destructive legacy continues, we need histories like those in Justice and the Interstates to combat it.
