After highways split Black communities, we’re reconnecting
Let’s take a journey back in time to look at two of the vibrant Black enclaves scattered across the country in the early to mid-20th century, one on the East Coast and the other in the Midwest. Each of them thrived until the birth of the interstate highway system.
Rondo, in Minnesota, was home to nearly 80% of St. Paul’s Black population, making it one of the largest Black communities in the Midwest. Residents produced Black newspapers, worked as educators and doctors, and ran barber shops, restaurants and grocery stores. Businesses prospered; neighborhood streets bustled with activity.
In the 1950s, the Rondo community was devastated by the construction of Interstate 94, resulting in the destruction of 700 homes and 300 businesses and decimating the social, cultural, economic and spiritual fabric of a oncethriving Black neighborhood.
Around the same time in West Baltimore, a vibrant Black community was torn apart to construct the U.S. 40/ Franklin-Mulberry Expressway.
The purpose of this highway? To connect white suburbs to downtown Baltimore.
For those who lived there, the neighborhood was idyllic. But the government labeled it a ghetto and razed nearly a thousand predominantly middleclass Black homes and 62 businesses to make way for the expressway.
Families lost generational wealth
After most of the highway project was canceled, residents were left with the 1.39-mile stretch now referred to as the “Highway to Nowhere.”
It stands as a monument to the destruction of a community and the strong ties residents had to support each other.
St. Paul and Baltimore represent just a fraction of the estimated 1 million people and businesses displaced by the buildout of the interstate highway system, casualties of a racist policy that promoted new highways along routes with low land costs and weak political resistance. In other words, the highways were built predominantly through low-income and Black neighborhoods.
Our communities have never been the same. Families lost generational wealth as homes were destroyed, lost value or were taken through foreclosure. Many people left close-knit, life-sustaining communities never to return. The effect on local families, economies and cultures, not to mention air quality, was devastating.
More than 50 years later, we are working to stitch our communities back together.
Baltimore and Rondo each has received a $2 million grant from the firstever national program created to reconnect communities divided by highways.
In late 2021, Congress passed President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastruc ture bill, including $1 billion to reconnect divided neighborhoods.
Nine months later, Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, providing an additional $3.2 billion to remove old transportation infrastructure that cut off neighborhoods from business districts and living wage jobs, with at least $1.3 billion set aside for economically disadvantaged communities.
How communities can recover
Together, these programs form the Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods program.
Ours were among the first of 45 communities to receive grants, out of 435 communities in nearly every state that applied, illustrating the widereaching destructive effects of federal highway policy.
ReConnect Rondo, founded in 2017, is coordinating a community-led project to create a revitalized African American cultural enterprise district connected by a community land bridge.
West Baltimore residents are still in the beginning stages of planning, having met for the first time last month with city transportation officials.
The program is just one initiative among many funded by the legislation. Together, the laws invested a historic $126 billion in more than 28 federal programs that aim to help low-income and Black communities, and other communities of color, reclaim their economic and cultural vibrancy, lower household energy bills and reduce the disproportionate amounts of pollution and climate risk they bear.
‘Tireless efforts of men’
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, the long arc of history seems to be bending toward justice.
But as we also know, in Dr. King’s words, “Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men.” And that work is far from over. After years of being let down by government promises, our communities are weary of projects that never came to fruition.
This time, though, we have hope that our communities will see progress.
City, state and federal agencies must work with residents to maximize the potential for these investments.
And the administration’s Justice40 Initiative – which aims to guarantee that 40% of the overall benefits of federal climate, clean energy, pollution cleanup and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities – should be codified into law.
Problems centuries in the making cannot be overcome in a few years or even decades.
But we are certain that through genuine intentions and tireless efforts we can – and must – make Dr. King’s vision for a beloved community a reality.
Keith Baker is the executive director of ReConnect Rondo. Glenn Isaac Smith is a lay minister and community advocate who serves as the vice president of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition and co-chair of the Get Maryland Moving Coalition.