White flight’s buffer strategy saddled new black homeowners with industrial and highway burdens

Evidence

Like other members of the middle class, these black residents had bought their new homes to escape working-class areas to the east. Two-thirds of the new homeowners, Lee reported, had picked Mozley Park because it had a “better location” or was “less crowded” than older black enclaves. Indeed, in contrast to where they had once been, the neighborhood seemed a paradise. … The main problem with this was, of course, the scorched-earth retreat of the whites who had lived there before them. In keeping with the “buffer plan,” two areas of light industry, a center of industrial warehouses and a housing project soon appeared around the neighborhood. With those aspects of the “no man’s land” in place, Mayor Hartsfield pressed for the buffer highway as well. … To make way for the project, the state and county condemned much of the black-owned land there in 1959, offering extremely low sums as compensation. Rev. William Holmes Borders, for instance, was offered $992 for a lot he owned, even though homes on that block had been going for nearly ten times that amount. Despite strong protests, the city bulldozed the whole southwestern section of the neighborhood. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 175

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘buffer plan’ converting black neighborhood margins into industrial zones and interstates parallels Robert Moses-era highway construction through minority neighborhoods in northern cities, and echoes the #trees article’s infrastructure-as-(mis)governance theme. — connects to: A single expressway’s noise and decline triggered cascading white flight and urban decay — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3722
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how systematically was condemnation-and-eminent-domain used to take black-owned land at depressed values across Atlanta’s transition neighborhoods — and who profited from the resale?
• SEED: A strong exhibit for an essay on how urban infrastructure (highways, industrial zoning) functioned as racial policy instruments even when not explicitly framed in racial terms.

Broader Connections

• A single expressway’s noise and decline triggered cascading white flight and urban decay #exemplifies (0.79) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3722