The Road to Civil Rights
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The Road to Civil Rights

Filetype[PDF-1.58 MB]


English
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Details:

  • Creators:
    Weingroff, Richard F.
  • Corporate Creators:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration
  • Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Series:
    FHWA Highway History Website Articles
  • Resource Type:
    Web Document
  • Right Statement:
    Public Domain
  • Geographical Coverage:
    United States
  • Corporate Publisher:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration
  • Abstract:
    Historian Mark H. Rose explained some of the effects of the change on the urban vision conceived along with the Interstate System: In many instances, engineers and local planners and politicians had sketched those routes years before, often as far back as 1939 when the neighborhoods were populated mostly by white householders . . . . By the early 1950s, however, urban America was in the middle of a vast movement of population in which black householders took up residence in the areas near downtown and whites relocated to the urban periphery. In short, black families and businesses now resided along potential Interstate corridors—areas of dense traffic flow and cheap land and thus the most likely corridors for great express highways. As neighborhoods changed from white to black, then, class as well as race conflict became embedded in that engineering logic. During the 1960s, these demographic changes began to affect route selection and construction in the nation’s cities. Up to the mid-1960s, the presence of a large black population failed to influence the politics of route selection as state engineers constructed Interstate roads through black neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, Columbus, Miami, and New York. After the mid-1960s, however, confrontation with imminent highway construction encouraged formation of business and neighborhood groups dedicated to stopping the construction process. Protesters decried “institutionalized racism” in the road program, which sought to build “white men’s roads through black men’s bedrooms.” The battles of the Civil Rights Movement had not only emboldened African-Americans to fight for justice, but had taught them the tactics that worked: By the late 1960s, moreover, leaders of many of those groups had become sophisticated about deploying legal and administrative procedures that were prerequisite in delaying highway construction. [Rose, Mark H., Interstate Express Highway Politics: 1939-1989 (Revised edition), The University of Tennessee Press, 1979, p. 107-108] Howard Gillette, Jr., who studied the impacts of highway and urban development on the African-American neighborhoods of Southwest Washington, D.C., said that political compromise was not possible because “the debate had become too polarized to resolve.” [Interstate Express, p. 108] The “humblest citizens” no longer were humble, and the fight against the Interstates became one element of a broad transformation of racial relations. The link between transportation and civil rights had been forged decades earlier.
  • Content Notes:
    This PDF was downloaded from FHWA's Highway History website: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/history.cfm.
  • Format:
    PDF
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