1956: Community Erasure and Community Building in the Highway Revolts

1900-1999: A New Divide
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

Black residents protested when the government claimed their homes and neighborhoods to build highways aimed at making it easier for White people from the St. Louis suburbs to access the city.

What’s important to know?

  1. Beltway Boom: In the 1950s, cities started building highways to make it easier for White families, who had moved out during White Flight, to access downtown areas. Most highways were routed through Black neighborhoods, leading to the loss of homes and wealth of many Black families.

  2. Highway Revolts: Community members joined forces to address injustices caused by highway programs in their neighborhoods.

  3. Results in St. Louis: In St. Louis, highway expansion projects started but faced opposition, resulting in the destruction of some neighborhoods and the creation of roads that went nowhere.

1: Beltway Boom

Elliott Plan for Saint Louis City’s Highways.

Source: Courtesy of Burbridge, J. “The Veering Path of Progress; Politics, Race, and Consensus in the North St. Louis Mark Twain Expressway Fight, 1950-1956.” Masters thesis, Saint Louis University, 2009. NEXT STL.

As State and local governments sought to build expansive “beltways” around cities, the African American communities within those cities suffered once again. Using the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, federal and state governments passed racist zoning and “redevelopment” laws that forced thousands of African Americans from their city homes and into other equally marginalized neighborhoods or poorly constructed public housing.

This mass displacement was enacted to make room for “beltways” around cities and freeways through urban centers, which were quickly being transformed from “blighted” Black neighborhoods to profitable commercial centers, such as sports arenas (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 66).

2: Highway Revolts

Communities across the country rose up to protest in what became known as “the highway revolts.” Organizers in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Baltimore, and St. Louis, gathered support, organized protests, and filed legal action against these projects. White planners presented romanticized pictures of streamlined traffic patterns leading to and from important downtown destinations, not considering the many people (usually Black) who would lose their homes as a result. They viewed these locations as easily convertible and “dispensable” because of their “blighted” conditions, forgetting that the conditions of these city neighborhoods had been confined and constrained by previous White policies forcing overcrowding and then claiming no funds existed to update public services and systems. Black neighborhoods and concerned citizen groups organized to protest: “no more white highways through black bedrooms” (Mohl, 2004, p. 679).

As urban planners began to realize the extent of disruption highway building could cause, they also had to face the reality of the situation they had created. “Displacement will be particularly serious in the big city black ghettos,” noted one city planner, “where the supply of housing is inadequate and relocation beyond the confines of the ghetto is severely limited by racial segregation” (p. 680).

Black middle-class and lower-class activists united in Baltimore, Maryland to fight the proposed highways and displacement they promised to build. In 1966, organized under the name RAM (Relocation Action Movement), they lobbied hard for the rights of impacted citizens. One organizer noted, “For too long, the history of Urban Renewal and Highway Clearance has been marked by repeated removal of black citizens. We have been asked to make sacrifice after sacrifice in the name of progress, and when that progress has been achieved we find it marked ‘White Only’” (p. 695).

Activists continued to highlight the structural inequalities disproportionately impacting Black neighborhoods and the continued frustration with decision-making that continued to erase Black communities and rights in urban America.

“No more white highways through black bedrooms”
— Protestor quoted in Mohl, "Stop the Road"

3: Results in St. Louis

St. Louis’ Black residents were not spared from the negative impact of beltway expansion. In Missouri “interstate highway construction had begun directly west of St. Louis City in 1956, promising an unprecedented level of traffic through the central city” (Lang, 2009, p. 130). Rather than acting as a conduit for White flight, new highways and freeways, city planners thought, would attract people and increase the population of Saint Louis. The “Expressway Plan for St. Louis and Adjacent Missouri Area” and the “Bartholomew Plan” were supposed to help St. Louis’s population rise to “900,000 by 1970” (Naffziger, 2020, par. 1; Schmitt, 2015, par. 1). 

City leaders abandoned these projects as more and more White residents - and their tax dollars - moved to the suburbs, leaving some roads only partially built. The highways and freeways that were built allowed White workers who had moved to the St. Louis County suburbs to commute into the city while avoiding the continuing urban neglect (Lang, 2009, p. 130). The result of this patch work road construction is the hodgepodge series of disorganized streets that now crisscross the city, adding to its congestion instead of alleviating it (Schmitt, 2015, par. 8).

Thompson Fullilove described the “two-fer” actions of the developers that isolated Black city residents:

Two mechanisms that ultimately worked synergistically to help clear the land: one was urban renewal and the other was the federal highway program. Imagine, then, the triangle of the ghetto diminished by the half circle of downtown completing itself by urban renewal, while highway construction took a juicy slice, generally aimed straight down the middle. (p. 64)

Thompson Fullilove (2016) summarized the root of the situation: “The problem the planners tackled was not how to undo poverty, but how to hide the poor” (p. 197).

In St. Louis examples of “hiding the poor” involved:

  • Corporate-driven “redevelopment” projects, supported by local banks and powerful businesses like Anheuser-Busch and McDonald Aircraft, began work on “a metropolitan research corridor with St. Louis City’s Central Corridor as its epicenter” (Lang, 2019, p. 130).

  • Saint Louis University acquired “more than twenty acres of land” in midtown for a mere $1 million donation” (Lang, 2019, p. 130).

  • A new home for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball franchise soon followed: Busch Stadium. The stadium’s proximity to the highways that had further segregated Black communities allowed predominantly white suburban residents to drive to baseball games while living in county communities that offered up-to-date infrastructure and better public education than could be found in the city (Lang, 2009, 130).

Think about It!

The Making of the American Black Ghetto

In 1989 Kenneth Clarke published a book titled Dark Ghetto: The Dilemmas of Social Power (Wesleyan University Press), where he explored the profoundly dehumanizing consequences of American residential segregation, redlining, blockbusting, and defunding of inner city social welfare programs. He also explores the equally impressive hope and conviction that propels African American communities to continue to fight for their communities and dignity within the Dark Ghetto. Read a selection from his work below and consider how this challenges the dominant narrative of Black people and Black spaces in America.

“America has contributed to the concept of the ghetto the restriction of persons to a special area and the limiting of their freedom of choice on the basis of skin color. The dark ghetto's invisible walls have been erected by the white society, by those who have power, both to confine those who have no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and—above all—economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters. The objective dimensions of the American urban ghettos are overcrowded and deteriorated housing, high infant mortality, crime, and disease. The subjective dimensions are resentment, hostility, despair, apathy, self-depreciation, and its ironic companion, compensatory grandiose behavior.

The ghetto is ferment, paradox, conflict, and dilemma. Yet within its pervasive pathology exists a surprising human resilience. The ghetto is hope, it is despair, it is churches and bars. It is aspiration for change, and it is apathy. It is vibrancy, it is stagnation. It is courage, and it is defeatism. It is cooperation and concern, and it is suspicion, competitiveness, and rejection. It is the surge toward assimilation, and it is alienation and withdrawal within the protective
walls of the ghetto.

The pathologies of the ghetto community perpetuate themselves through cumulative ugliness, deterioration, and isolation and strengthen the Negro's sense of worthlessness, giving testimony to his impotence. Yet the ghetto is not totally isolated. The mass media—radio, television, moving pictures, magazines, and the press—penetrate, indeed, invade the ghetto in continuous and inevitable communication, largely one-way, and project the values and aspirations, the manners and the style of the larger white-dominated society. Those who are required to live in congested and rat-infested homes are aware that others are not so dehumanized. Young people in the ghetto are aware that other young people have been taught to read, that they have been prepared for college, and can compete successfully for white-collar, managerial, and executive jobs. Whatever accommodations they themselves must make to the negative realities which dominate their own lives, they know consciously or unconsciously that their fate is not the common fate of mankind. They tend to regard their predicament as a consequence of personal disability or as an inherent and imposed powerlessness which all Negroes share.

The privileged white community is at great pains to blind itself to conditions of the ghetto, but the residents of the ghetto are not themselves blind to life as it is outside of the ghetto. They observe that others enjoy a better life, and this knowledge brings a conglomerate of hostility, despair, and hope. If the ghetto could be contained totally, the chances of social revolt would be decreased, if not eliminated, but it cannot be contained and the outside world intrudes. The Negro lives in part in the world of television and motion pictures, bombarded by the myths of the American middle class, often believing as literal truth their pictures of luxury and happiness, and yet at the same time confronted by a harsh world of reality where the dreams do not come true or change into nightmares. The discrepancy between the reality and the dream bums into their consciousness. The oppressed can never be sure whether their failures reflect personal inferiority or the fact of color. This persistent and agonizing conflict dominates their lives” (p. 10-11).

Your Turn

How did the highway revolts draw attention to the ongoing segregation and unfair treatment of Black families within urban centers across America? How did this contribute to the ongoing challenges of creating generational wealth in the African American community?

    • Read about the connection between the highway revolts and the emergence of the environmental justice movement.

    • Read about the connection between cars, federal transportation investments, and poverty.

    • Review this article from The Pop History Dig on highway revolts across America.

    • Read:

      • Clarke, K. (1989). Dark Ghetto: The Dilemmas of Social Power. Wesleyan University Press.

      • Lewis, T. (2013). Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. Cornell University Pres.

      • Mohl, R. A. (2004). Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities. Journal of Urban History, 30(5), 674-706. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144204265180`

      • Rose, M. H. and Mohl, R. A. (2012). Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy Since 1939. The University of Tennessee.

  • General Resources:

    • Read this article from the St. Louis Magazine on “orphan” streets in St. Louis as a result of the highway growth in the 1950s and 60.

    Books & Articles:

    Archives:

    Museums & Parks:

    • Archer, D. (2020). “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes” : Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction. Vanderbilt Law Review, 73 (5), 1259-1330.

    • ——-. (2025). Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. W. W. Norton & Company.

Stephanie Brizee
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1955: You Will See the Results of Hate

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1963: Human Rights and Civil Rights