You must log in or register to comment.
In Atlanta, this happened in several places:
- Sweet Auburn, including the “richest Negro street in the world” at the time, was bisected to build the Downtown Connector.
- Lightning was bulldozed to build the Georgia World Congress Center and the Georgia Dome.
- Buttermilk Bottom was bulldozed to build the Civic Center.
(To be fair, Atlanta also razed at least one white neighborhood, too. Copenhill was destroyed to make room for the I-485/GA 400 interchange, which was never built due to the Freeway Revolts and eventually became Freedom Parkway and the Carter Center instead.)
deleted by creator
Somehow yeah
And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.
And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.
St. Louis arch
The Dunsmuir Viaduct in Vancouver, BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley,_Vancouver
Halifax, Nova Scotia. Demolished a black community for a bridge.
Ok, that’s it! I’m never enjoying architecture, engineering, landscaping, or roadways in North America again!
Joking aside, it IS really fucked up that all of that was allowed to not just be done, but then forgotten!
It’s not perfect, but Austin, TX did an almost okay-ish job protecting Blackland. It’s not great, but it’s a symbol of what the tiniest amount of progress can look like.
Brooklyn neighborhood in Charlotte, NC, which is now mostly just parking lots
Nashville’s i65 on the North West
I-10 in New Orleans
The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn’t go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.
There’s a really good Behind the Bastards about the guy who made those decisions. Can’t remember his name.
Robert Moses
99 Percent Invisible also did a great mini series about the book The Power Broker, which is about the life of Robert Moses.
Lake Lanier in Georgia too, under that reservoir was Oscarville.
I375 in Detroit
Same in St. Louis, but they went also went right through the “not the right color of white” Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods.
deleted by creator
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
Really? Even I as a random European know about it. I have never heard of the show though.
Graduated from an Oklahoma high school, and it was never discussed.
Exactly when I saw that episode turn to my wife asked if true. She said same thing never heard about it.
They did update the standards to include it, and it is more common now for people to know about it now. There was a high school robotics team I remember that might have done something to help with some search for the mass graves, and I know a local university has done field trips to Greenwood.
Viola Fletcher passed away a few months ago. Never got any form of reparations.
Yeah they are doing search have been for few years now.
Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Austin wiped out the lower income families for lofts.
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol’ boys in the 1960s.
“Nothing changes, even when it wants to” Hayes Carll
People will see your comment and think “hey that sounds like my city”, but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
This is part of what’s called redlining.
To offer a refinement, if I can, redlining is adjacent to this highway abuse, so, easy to join them; same racially driven bastardry, different technique.
Redlining was a real estate / financial tool that kept certain homes on a map from having access to resources. Sort of like financial gerrymandering. It’s kinda cool, in a privileged way, to see a city’s ghetto map and a redlined map overlaid; there is little difference.
Anyway, I couldn’t find a term for this neighborhood wrecking highway practice, but did find this article that goes into detail and links the book Dividing by Design.
The Roads That Tear Communities Apart https://share.google/6G6B8K9VNck1Cb0ZW
One more: I thought redlining also conveyed purposeful impediments to black home ownership, like in the refusal of mortgage applications.
- There were communities in suburbs built and federal funded that included racial exclusion provisions.
Ayo Magwood has pulled together a great amount of information about the topic. Recently, she seems to have shifted to economic inequality driving many of the issues that were once, like all the years before the last 5 or so, primarily racial.
Structural Racism — Uprooting Inequity https://share.google/1A6sgjkI0UOwpFxeO
75\85?
275
Sweet Auburn!
630?
To add to y’all’s reading list:
Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport
Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013
And this one
Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could
This is what happened in Hartford CT. Fucking ugliest, shit city I’ve ever been to. They ruined the whole fucking city because, racism. I believe the highway was built sometime in the 50s/60s and it’s still a plague on the city.
And let us not forget the Vanport flood, which the Portland authorities downplayed for decades and used as an excuse to pave over a vibrant community to make a raceway and a golf course. They only recently admitted that there was ‘some’ loss of life.
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It’s is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: “[…] or tear it down - and start again.”
It’s always been this way. Really dumb fucks ruin everything. And the meme of racism simply won’t die as long as there are dumb, gullible shitheads that gobble it up. Humanity exists on a bell curve, and the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. Racism is an easy meme and extremely virulent among religious. The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit. Humanity is so fucking disappointing. A bunch of stupid fucking apes with nukes.
[…] the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. […] The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit.
I was going to object to your first bit, but then you objected yourself. Did you notice the contradiction? :p
I would argue that the people trying to manipulate others are not “the smart ones” but a certain level of intellect is the tool you need to act out your psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies, which are actually what triggers the desire to manipulate others.
haha, you’re right. The nuance you add about certain level of intellect is a good addition and it was my intent to communicate that.
That said, most manipulators still look like borderline retarded from my perspective. And there are people way smarter than myself :)
It’s very similar to how a lot of Americans didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
I learned about it because of the show.
But I’m also not from the US. Still felt weird that it wasn’t talked about more
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Or rosewood Florida, two years later. (1923 rosewood massacre)
Once i learned about what they did I can’t forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn’t stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.
I didn’t learn about the Tulsa Massacre until the first Trump term. I’m over 50 years old.
There were also a number of similar incidents elsewhere.
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).
Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.
WTF
It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be “improved” by stuff like this. Like, “hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!”
I’d like to point out that even when this isn’t true, the “major public improvement” tends to border one, close enough that it gets cut off from the surroundings and goes into financial ruin causing others to look at the neighborhood a few years later and THEN decide its property that needs to be “improved” (gentrified)… To the point that the original inhabitants are priced out of their own family homes.
One of those “whew, they dodged a bullet… Of wait, they didn’t” times that happens quite a lot.
And for Latinx people in LA it is being evicted from their homes to make Dodger Stadium
Wtf is Latinx? Do you mean Latinos, as is the preferred term of the Latino community and not some BS made up word by white people with a savior complex?
The term being a creation of white people is a common but mistaken belief. Latinx is a gender neutral version of Latino/Latina created by English-speaking queer Latinx people in the early 2000s who hated that the inherent gender binary in the Spanish language couldn’t properly represent Latinx people who didn’t identify as Latinos or Latinas. It’s since become an inclusive catch-all term for the entire community, regardless of gender identity.
Also, I don’t know if you’re intending it to come off that way, but your reaction to the term is a very common one among homophobic Latinos.
The attitude is also a very common one among the non homophobic Latinos.
Except tacking an x on to the end is not a common Spanish pronunciation and completely discounts how jarring that is to use in speech. The whole thing also stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of gendered language, Latino can already be used to refer to male/female/nonbinary, just as the word for person (persona) can refer to any gender despite ending in the feminine form of -a.
It comes across as “Wow, so maybe you weren’t aware, but your language which is fundamental to your entire culture is like… Really problematic??? I heard it uses gendered words and that’s just like really micro-aggressive and could be offensive to people. Here, let us fix your language for you. What? No I don’t know any Spanish and don’t plan on learning.”
But even those who identify as different genders or none prefer latino/latina, ask them, the lbgtqs would always be the ones saying they don’t like that term in college here in california at least.
They would always chime in and interrupt the professors, I remember being confused.
The way the language works and how feminine and masculine phrases/terms are different based on who says them is the identfier, they use neutral, masculine, or feminine language.
I’ve only heard latinos get upset about latinx in california, they’ll argue with the professors everytime
They might have meant “Latino” based on their user name. I dunno. /s
deleted by creator
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
Probably Europe too. It just played out over a longer time, which made it less pronounced, and more forgotten.
The more recent the theft the more it features in our indignation. Palestine > Americas > Europe.
This doesn’t mean by the way that what happened in the Americas or Palestine is any less bad. Colonizers are eager to say: “look it happened before, look it happens elsewhere.” But fuck them.
In fact it makes their crimes worse. Every time lessons are not learned the responsibility increases.
It only strengthens the case for the universal fight to redistribute what has been stolen.
Thieves, murderers and rapists. Absolute scum of the earth. They must be fully ostracized.
The difference with the “over a longer time” thing is that no one would expect people in like 500 CE to have similar values to us, meanwhile countries like 19th century-onwards USA explicitly pride themselves on equality, including between races (after 1866, anyway).
Not “just about” everywhere in America, literally the whole country was taken from someone.
Well, I am sure there must be some really remote desolate land somewhere that no one had claimed. And of course the native Americans didn’t believe in owning land, so it is a bit fuzzy “technically”. But we all know what happened…
When do we think we can say we knew better?
I’ll let you know if we ever get there.
