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Oakland is debating whether freeways separating blacks from whites should be demolished. A symbolic step.
In June 1956, the so-called National Interstate and Defense Highways Act was passed – the largest road construction project in American history up to that point.
With an incredible 25 billion dollars at the time, more than 40,000 miles of highways were to be built all over the United States within ten years. A road network that should connect the American metropolises.
However, subsidies for returning World War II veterans created a situation that mainly favored the white population, as Ben Crowther of the non-profit organization Congress for the New Urbanism, an urban planning group, explains.
The courses of the streets were chosen primarily for racist reasons.
«When the highways were built, the courses of the streets were chosen primarily for racist reasons. A system has been established whereby a road planner will choose the path where there is least fear of resistance, both from a financial and political point of view. And that hit precisely those neighborhoods where the houses of People of Color had been devalued because of the redlining,” says Crowther.
And those were the quarters of the African American population. The quarters were poorly developed because they were neglected by the authorities. In the USA this is referred to as “redlining”.
The 980 freeway runs through the Californian city of Oakland. And this 980 separates the historically African-American district in West Oakland from the city center. A five-lane, lowered expressway that is 170 meters wide overall. Just four blocks from here is the mighty Oakland City Hall.
For Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, the 980 is depressing: “It reminds me of a moat. It always looked to me like a racial divide protecting downtown from the black neighborhood of West Oakland.”
But a broad discussion about the future of these freeways has begun. “The accelerator for this was George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement,” says Nate Miley. Since 2001 he has been the supervisor for the Alameda district in California, where Oakland is the largest city.
For him it is clear that this fight to dismantle the 980 is more of symbolic politics. “The dismantling of the freeway alone would not go to the roots of racism and injustice. What is clear to me, however, is that this symbolic act would show that we as a society are capable of overcoming historical mistakes made against people of color. Symbolic, but a step in the right direction.”
In the infrastructure plan of President Joe Biden’s administration, funds are earmarked for the remediation of such historical mistakes in urban planning. Whether it will be implemented will certainly also depend on future majorities in Congress and on who sits in the White House. From how you look at the history of the country. In the deeply divided United States, the answer is still open.