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).

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. Activists were able to protect some cities in the U.S. from highway development and Black population displacement.

St. Louis’ Black residents were not spared from the negative impact of beltway expansion.

However, 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). 

A series of expressways were planned as part of the failed North-South Distributor project and other initiatives. These projects would have sliced up the city and displaced thousands of primarily Black residents, but 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).