Taking the Low Road of Least Resistance: Race, Interstate 40, and Urban Renewal in Nashville and America.
In the late 1960s, calls for urban renewal were being heard across America from politicians and the public alike. In Nashville, Tennessee, the urge to redevelop the ghetto was particularly fervent, particularly after a low-grade riot in 1967 associated with Black Power militants had rattled citizens of both races. The most dramatic example of this impulse -- but hardly the sole one --was the construction of Interstate 40 directly through North Nashville, the predominant African American neighborhood in the city.The process had begun years before, with a revealing political process that evinced clashes between city and state officials and private consultants, along with the pernicious influence of realty interests. These differences, however, were papered over as politicians at every level -- local, state, and federal -- unified in contempt of black participation indecision-making. This trend, along with internal schisms in the African American community, stifled activist responses that protested the highway's path after construction actually began.
The immediate result of Interstate 40, the virtual annihilation of black-owned businesses in Nashville, was one thing. But longer-term repercussions also loomed. Ultimately the road was the first salvo in a sustained barrage of public-policy decisions that radically reshaped the city's landscape in race-conscious ways. In conjunction with War on Poverty programs, persistent white flight, public housing, and continuing wrangling over school desegregation and the rise of private schools, the highway was a means to remake the city as safe for white suburbanites after the persistent inroads that the civil rights movement had made on white space and institutions. As such, the interstate symbolizes then and now the updated but persistent legacies of segregation and the political, class, and racial implications inherent in urban renewal and the corresponding ascent of the Sun Belt. Moreover, Nashville's example parallels similar stories from regions across the U.S., reinforcing the lesson that southern-style segregation was but a darker blot among racial stain on American history, as the forces behind urban renewal had no sectional loyalties.
Benjamin Houston, Carnegie Mellon University