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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.)
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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.
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.
The neighborhood was originally known as Blackland and was settled by Swedish immigrants
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
This dude?
Btw just discovered behind the bastards by delving into L Rom Hubbard. Hilarious.
No, Olmsted was a landscape architect (also did Biltmore in NC). The state or city parks commissioner who did it. Can’t remember his name. He also explicitly didn’t leave room for future light rail expansion when they build the LIE, or some other expressway. Been awhile since I lostened to that one.
99 Percent Invisible also did a great mini series about the book The Power Broker, which is about the life of Robert Moses.
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.
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From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would “not be forgotten”
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
Nah, time travel and transrace!
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
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.
Like covering the revolutionary war several times? How could we forgo that?!
So?
So there would be no time for Americans to learn about other countries and the advantages of the metric system. Oh… wait… never mind.
Where are you from?
Oh look he needs help setting up his ad hominem attack.
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Afraid to answer the question when it’s not an ad hominem. Go ahead and attack me. I don’t mind cowards.
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.
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
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
75\85?
275
Sweet Auburn!
…six seven?
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 currently happening, right now, in Knoxville, Tennessee and Nashville, Tennessee
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 :)
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
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.
I watched the Watchmen TV series a couple years back (at age 40) and during the Tulsa massacre scene I was like “oh this takes place in an alternate history where the KKK won”
Then next year in college I took a course in American History… oof.
I’m not American, but I also learned about it watching the Watchmen series, then Wikipedia. Wasn’t that surprised, though. The only time I went to the USA some kids threw a heavy rock through our camping tent window while we, Mexican kids, were away. It didn’t strike me like some kids mischief even at that time.
There is an unfortunate anti-homeless sentiment in some parts of the US, where people will wreck camping tents on sight regardless of the occupants’ skin color. I’m sorry you had to deal with such hateful behavior.
It was at some Boy Scouts of America event.
Oh yeah, probably racism then. They have a history of it.
There were also a number of similar incidents elsewhere.
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
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!”
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.
I think blocking people from owning their land is part of what enables this.
The USA has always been hostile to non-white people.
Shit, they were hostile to the wrong kind of white people for most of the time as well…
Body Count - No Lives Matter is a good song that shows poor white people were just the last step.
once they outlive their usefulness, they just become unsightly reminders.
But they’ve fixed the issue of discrimination by now being hostile to everyone.
Improvement? Idk, but it’s certainly more equitable.
Look at this administration being all progressive and shit. They must have thought, hey, look, we shouldn’t just be horrible to brown people, that’s not a fair or just society.
