Interstate highways were deliberately routed through Black neighborhoods nationwide

Evidence

This common practice of steering new interstates through minority neighborhoods—rich and poor alike—was repeated across the South in cities like Charlotte, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans, Richmond, and Tampa. But it was not simply a Southern phenomenon. Countless metropolitan areas throughout the country saw similar patterns, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Washington. Activists in the capital decried the practice of “white men’s roads through Black men’s bedrooms,” but the phenomenon nevertheless proliferated across the entire nation. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1199

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports ‘Grafting & Growth’ infra series by showing how infrastructural decisions encode and deepen existing social hierarchies, adding a racial-division mechanism to the tree-as-urban-infrastructure frame.