Today, major roads and highways serve as stark dividing lines between black and white sections in cities like Buffalo, Hartford, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St. While Interstates were regularly used to destroy black neighborhoods, they were also used to keep black and white neighborhoods apart. This was a common practice not just in Southern cities like Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Richmond and Tampa, but in countless metropolises across the country, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta - local expressways at first, then Interstates - were steered along routes that bulldozed “blighted” neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities. The federal government shouldered nine-tenths of the cost of the new Interstate highways, but local officials often had a say in selecting the path. This intertwined history of infrastructure and racial inequality extended into the 1950s and 1960s with the creation of the Interstate highway system. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The postwar programs for urban renewal, for instance, destroyed black neighborhoods and displaced their residents with such regularity that African-Americans came to believe, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase, that “urban renewal means Negro removal.” Other policies simply targeted black communities for isolation and demolition. During the New Deal, federal agencies like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration encouraged redlining practices that explicitly marked minority neighborhoods as risky investments and therefore discouraged bank loans, mortgages and insurance there.
Such laws were eventually invalidated by the Supreme Court, but later measures achieved the same effect by more subtle means. Civic planners pushed them into ghettos, and the segregation we know today became the rule.Īt first the rule was overt, as Southern cities like Baltimore and Louisville enacted laws that mandated residential racial segregation. Once they had no need to keep constant watch over African-Americans, whites wanted them out of sight. But with the abolition of slavery, the spatial relationship was reversed. Before the Civil War, white masters kept enslaved African-Americans close at hand to coerce their labor and guard against revolts. In Atlanta, as in dozens of cities across America, daily congestion is a direct consequence of a century-long effort to segregate the races.įor much of the nation’s history, the campaign to keep African-Americans “in their place” socially and politically manifested itself in an effort to keep them quite literally in one place or another. Commuters might assume they’re stuck there because some city planner made a mistake, but the heavy congestion actually stems from a great success.
#ATLANTA TRAFFIC ALERT DRIVERS#
Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, from the constantly clogged Georgia 400 to a complicated cluster of overpasses at Tom Moreland Interchange, better known as “Spaghetti Junction.” The Downtown Connector - a 12-to-14-lane megahighway that in theory connects the city’s north to its south - regularly has three-mile-long traffic jams that last four hours or more. Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States.
0 kommentar(er)
