Interstate highways were routed through minority neighborhoods despite federal funding

Evidence

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. As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta—local expressways at first, then interstates—steered along routes that invariably ran right through the neighborhoods of racial minorities. Planners often argued that they targeted the most “blighted” regions for bulldozing, and the poor residents there simply happened to be African American. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case study on how historical controversy works: planners’ claimed reason (blight) vs actual pattern (race) mirrors the ‘deviation vs design’ distinction.