Freeways devoured state’s historic Black neighborhoods

Such an outlandish absurdity, sullying the history of America’s great highway projects with racist imputations. As if Washington’s whacky woke has confused Bull Connors with bulldozers. What a laugh.

Our governor was certainly amused. “I heard some stuff, some weird stuff from the Secretary of Transportation trying to make this about social issues,” Ron DeSantis told a reporter Tuesday. “To me, a road’s a road.”

DeSantis, as usual, had taken his cue from Tucker Carlson, the TV commentator who out-Foxed Sean Hannity to become the nation’s preeminent cultural warmonger. The night before, Carlson ranted, “Roads can’t be racist. You can’t build racism into a road. They are inanimate objects. They are not alive. That seems obvious, but apparently, Pete Buttigieg didn’t know it.”

Carlson and, by extension, DeSantis were offended when U.S. Transportation Secretary Buttigieg discussed an allocation in the justpassed infrastructure bill that would subsidize efforts to repair or mitigate the damage suffered by urban communities that had been in the way of last century’s freeway builders.

For that, Carlson declared Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar, one of the “dumbest people in the world.”

Buttigieg had cited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of New York City’s “master planner” Robert Moses, which described how his highway projects created barriers separating Black New Yorkers from parks and other public amenities meant for whites.

Tucker and Ron dismissed the notion as a slanderous rewriting of American history by the same lefties who’ve embellished the racist subtexts of slavery, segregation, the Confederacy, the usurpation of Indian homeland, the Mexican land grab, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and lately, police violence. And now, even road building.

That sounds like crazy talk in the rural hinterlands, where communities coveted access to four-lane highways. But urban Americans whose homes and businesses were devoured by freeway construction have less wonderful recollections.

Near the southern terminus of Interstate 95, planners routed their freeway through Overtown, the center of Black culture in Miami, with shops, nightclubs, a theater and hotels that, in a segregated city, accommodated entertainers like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke.

More than 32,000 people resided in Overtown before a huge swath of the community was cleared to make way for I-95, then I-395. More than 60 businesses were destroyed. Two-thirds of the residents were displaced or they abandon the area on their own accord as the decimated neighborhood declined into an impoverished slum.

Meanwhile in Tampa, unashamed city planners put their racist intent in writing, as they charted a proposed freeway that would “do much toward cleaning up blighted slums” that were “occupied by colored people [who] should be eliminated and moved to other areas,” according to the Tampa Bay Times. Tampa’s Black business district was disparaged as “a cancerous infection” and “a source of crimes, immorality, delinquency and other evil influences.” In Orlando, Interstate 4 and the East-West Expressway were routed through the Parramore Black businesses district, wiping out 1,000 homes, 200 businesses and three churches.

Last year, the Jaxson news and culture website offered a similarly unhappy history of freeway construction in Jacksonville. “In the 1950s and ’60s, the once upper class and prestigious Black community of Sugar Hill in Jacksonville was chosen by city officials to be leveled to make way for a multi-lane expressway. Once known for its elegance and millionaire residents, Sugar Hill was left decimated, and what remains of it today sits largely boarded up, ghostly and overgrown.”

A few years ago, I visited Woodlawn Cemetery, Fort Lauderdale’s historic Black cemetery, hoping to locate the grave of Rubin Stacy, a young laborer lynched on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale in 1935. No luck. Stacy’s mutilated body had been buried in one of the scores of unmarked pauper graves in the western part of Woodlawn, a section later devoured by I-95, never mind the burial plots. “They knew this was a gravesite,” Edna Elijah, president of the Lauderdale Manors neighborhood association, told the Sun Sentinel in 2015, when the desecration was exposed. “Somebody has to take responsibility.”

Nobody has.

It’s the sad history of freeway construction — displacement, destruction and elevated highways that put a barrier between minority neighborhoods and swankier zip codes. Lately, urban planners are trying to undo the damage, perhaps rerouting or lowering freeways or sending them into tunnels under parkland.

Buttigieg has a billion dollars to subsidize projects that humanize cityscapes and undo racist legacies. Of course, Tucker and Ron have a point: It would be much cheaper to just ignore unsavory chapters of American history.

If you want to follow their thinking in such matters, just take Dixie Highway and keep right.