STRUCTURE:

While some examples of racism in U.S. highway planning have been cited from the 1930s and 1940s, the highest-profile allegations have involved the Interstate Highway System, which was established in the mid-1950s and was in its heaviest design and building phase through the mid-1970s. 

Most of the system consists of inter-city routes, which generally run through lightly populated areas and have attracted little controversy. However, the routes through cities -- which often required the clearing of densely populated neighborhoods -- were controversial at the time, and have only become more so in recent years.

One fundamental reality of road-building, experts say, is to keep costs down, and the price tag for land acquisition can sometimes exceed the cost of construction.

Sometimes the quest for cheaper real estate led through public parks or dilapidated waterfronts. These produced some unpopular examples of vista-scarring blight -- some of which were later torn down or scaled back, such as the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco.

But in other cases, highway planners eyed routes through populated areas -- and "inevitably, this sent interstates barreling through the poorest parts of town," Swift said. "In the years during which the system was being laid out, that usually meant African American neighborhoods."

Often, the motivations for road-building came from political and business leaders in urban centers, who sought to stop the loss of population and businesses from downtown by luring back car-driving suburbanites, said Mark H. Rose, a historian at Florida Atlantic University.

"In hindsight, we correctly understand that a tacit racism was a part of many of the planners' decisions," said Tom Lewis, the author of "Divided Highways" and a professor of English at Skidmore College. "It was rarely, if ever, overt. Planners had little guidance other than to create a safe highway at the least possible cost."

But he added: "The effects on the underrepresented, especially Blacks and Latinos, were devastating."

Often, extra-wide rights of way were approved so that "decaying" homes and apartments in a project's path could be demolished. "It seemed a win-win to planners, but it didn't feel that way to the people who found themselves in the juggernaut's path," Swift said.

Black neighborhoods scarred by highways

There are numerous examples of Interstate highways tearing through existing neighborhoods populated largely by people of color.

In Miami, I-95 ran through the predominantly Black neighborhood of Overtown. In Alabama, portions of I-65 or I-85 were routed through Black communities in Montgomery and Birmingham. In Los Angeles, freeway planners targeted Boyle Heights, a neighborhood with many Mexican Americans. 

In North Carolina, a freeway decimated the "Black Wall Street of the South" in Durham's Hayti neighborhood. The North Claiborne Avenue area of New Orleans was the home of the Black Mardi Gras, but in the early 1960s, highway planners all but destroyed the neighborhood for an elevated section of I-10. Other examples can be found in Baltimore, Detroit and Richmond, Va., among other cities.

Sometimes Interstates were built in ways that kept racial groups apart.

"In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear," Princeton University historian Kevin M. Kruse has written. "Interstate 20, the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta's center, was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as 'the boundary between the white and Negro communities on the west side of town."

In St. Paul, Minn., I-94 was built through the Rondo neighborhood, which had been settled initially by Jewish residents and then by African Americans moving out of the tenements of downtown St. Paul, said Rebecca Wingo, a historian at the University of Cincinnati who has written about the history of Rondo along with community resident Marvin Anderson.

Initially, developers proposed two routes, one along an abandoned railroad and the other along Rondo Avenue, the neighborhood's main artery. The state chose the path through the Black neighborhood.

"Some residents took the lowball offer on their home and moved away; others fought through the legal system; still others sat on their front porches with shotguns and waited for police," Wingo and Anderson wrote.

All told, the highway construction displaced over 750 families and 125 businesses. "But it's not like Rondo residents were able to go and buy a new home for the price of their payment -- their homes were undervalued, and racist housing covenants prevented residents from buying in certain areas," Wingo told PolitiFact.

The legacy of Robert Moses

One of the most notorious examples of racism in highway planning predates the Interstate system: the Southern State Parkway on New York's Long Island, which was built by the powerful planner Robert Moses.

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