In Atlanta, this happened in several places:
- Sweet Auburn, including the “richest Negro street in the world” at the time, was bisected to build the Downtown Connector.
- Lightning was bulldozed to build the Georgia World Congress Center and the Georgia Dome.
- Buttermilk Bottom was bulldozed to build the Civic Center.
(To be fair, Atlanta also razed at least one white neighborhood, too. Copenhill was destroyed to make room for the I-485/GA 400 interchange, which was never built due to the Freeway Revolts and eventually became Freedom Parkway and the Carter Center instead.)
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol’ boys in the 1960s.
“Nothing changes, even when it wants to” Hayes Carll
75\85?
Sweet Auburn!
This is part of what’s called redlining.
To offer a refinement, if I can, redlining is adjacent to this highway abuse, so, easy to join them; same racially driven bastardry, different technique.
Redlining was a real estate / financial tool that kept certain homes on a map from having access to resources. Sort of like financial gerrymandering. It’s kinda cool, in a privileged way, to see a city’s ghetto map and a redlined map overlaid; there is little difference.
Anyway, I couldn’t find a term for this neighborhood wrecking highway practice, but did find this article that goes into detail and links the book Dividing by Design.
The Roads That Tear Communities Apart https://share.google/6G6B8K9VNck1Cb0ZW
One more: I thought redlining also conveyed purposeful impediments to black home ownership, like in the refusal of mortgage applications.
People will see your comment and think “hey that sounds like my city”, but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn’t include a continent name
It’s also interesting when the New York Times writes an uppercase Black but a lowercase white in the same article.
because Black refers to a specific cultural group while white doesn’t (that’d be Irish-American or whatever)
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It’s is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: “[…] or tear it down - and start again.”
WTF
It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be “improved” by stuff like this. Like, “hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!”
I’d like to point out that even when this isn’t true, the “major public improvement” tends to border one, close enough that it gets cut off from the surroundings and goes into financial ruin causing others to look at the neighborhood a few years later and THEN decide its property that needs to be “improved” (gentrified)… To the point that the original inhabitants are priced out of their own family homes.
One of those “whew, they dodged a bullet… Of wait, they didn’t” times that happens quite a lot.
It’s very similar to how a lot of Americans didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
And for Latinx people in LA it is being evicted from their homes to make Dodger Stadium
Chances are, if your town has a resivoir or dam, it was built in such a way to flood out or fuck over a thriving black community.
Reminds me of Watchmen teaching a lot of Oklahomans about their black wall street.
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Or rosewood Florida, two years later. (1923 rosewood massacre)
Once i learned about what they did I can’t forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn’t stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
Probably Europe too. It just played out over a longer time, which made it less pronounced, and more forgotten.
The more recent the theft the more it features in our indignation. Palestine > Americas > Europe.
This doesn’t mean by the way that what happened in the Americas or Palestine is any less bad. Colonizers are eager to say: “look it happened before, look it happens elsewhere.” But fuck them.
In fact it makes their crimes worse. Every time lessons are not learned the responsibility increases.
It only strengthens the case for the universal fight to redistribute what has been stolen.
Thieves, murderers and rapists. Absolute scum of the earth. They must be fully ostracized.
The difference with the “over a longer time” thing is that no one would expect people in like 500 CE to have similar values to us, meanwhile countries like 19th century-onwards USA explicitly pride themselves on equality, including between races (after 1866, anyway).
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
