Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  The Bell family had moved in upstairs from Eula not long ago. The mother, Camille, was struggling to make ends meet and wound up in public housing. But she worked hard to protect her kids from the malign influences of the ghetto. All four of the Bell kids were good students, but Yusef was the star, a student at the local gifted program with an almost encyclopedic memory. People in the neighborhood liked to quiz him just for the fun of hearing him rattle off answers. He seemed destined to make something of himself, to get out of the shabby McDaniel-Glenn projects where he lived.

  But Yusef Bell never came back from the Reese Grocery Store with Eula’s snuff. Eighteen days later, his strangled body was found in the crawl space of an abandoned school not far from his home. People in the neighborhood were shocked. He had been such a promising boy. At his funeral service, Reverend Timothy McDonald of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, declared Yusef’s death a tragedy for the community: “His potential to liberate his people was blighted out.”

  Blighted out. It was an odd phrase. Blight was a word heard a lot in the seventies, but it was always used for cities, as in “urban blight.” Yusef had been killed by a person; someone had placed human hands around his small neck and squeezed it until he stopped breathing. That was murder, not blight.

  And yet, there was a connection, felt at first by the black community and later by the whole nation. Beginning in the 1960s, urban highways had been used to drive a radical program of urban renewal aimed at eliminating blight. But what they did was produce more of it. They dispersed poor communities, helped jobs, businesses, and middle-class residents flee the center city, and turned formerly stable neighborhoods into dangerous ghettos. The highway program divided the nation’s cities into zones separating white from black, affluent from poor, hope-filled from hopeless, allowing the well-off to ignore the poorest sections as they slid into squalor and despair. It devalued the lives of the urban poor. Children like Yusef Bell became easy prey for a killer partly because of decisions made by urban planners and highway engineers with little thought for the effect they might have on kids’ lives. So in that sense, Yusef was indeed blighted out. The blighting had begun more than a decade before he was born.

  • • • • •

  Shortly after the 1956 highway bill passed, the Saturday Evening Post published an encomium on the coming interstate network. “A happy by-product of all these expressway developments,” it declared, “is that they invariably do an excellent job of slum clearance as they knife through the poorer sections of the city.” Buying highway right-of-way in low-rent neighborhoods would save the government money. But even more, planners saw it as beneficial. The knife metaphor says a lot about how planners saw interstates: as weapons in a war against slums. Robert Moses put it most famously in his graphic description of building urban expressways: “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way through with a meat ax.”

  When the highway bill passed in 1956, the consensus among city planners and politicians was that swinging the meat ax would save America’s cities. Highways would untangle snarled traffic in central business districts, stemming the exodus of retailers to the suburbs. They would separate dank manufacturing areas from leafy residential enclaves, promoting a more wholesome and orderly way of life. And they would plow through the city’s poorest, shabbiest residential areas, eliminating urban blight. To the planners, using highways to “knife through the poorer sections” was not violence, but surgery. And there was little doubt about who needed that surgery: African American migration into urban centers during the world wars had changed the racial makeup of cities. For planners, “urban blight” was often synonymous with “black neighborhood.”

  In its first decade, the interstate highway program destroyed some 330,000 urban housing units across the nation, the majority of them occupied by minorities and the poor. After that the pace picked up. No one knows the exact number, but estimates are that the highway program displaced around a million Americans. Black neighborhoods bore the brunt of it. Highway programs wiped out Paradise Valley, the Detroit neighborhood that gave birth to Motown. They bulldozed Overtown, the heart of black Miami, and North Claiborne Avenue, a vibrant African American commercial boulevard in New Orleans, home to the nation’s largest stand of live oak trees. In Boston, New York, Charlotte, Nashville, Montgomery, Birmingham, Columbus, St. Paul, and Los Angeles, black communities were lost to the freeway. Expressways were used not only to clear out communities the planners dubbed “slums,” but to isolate and contain the black neighborhoods that remained.

  “When the American people, through their Congress, voted a little while ago for a twenty-six-billion-dollar highway program,” declared Lewis Mumford, “the most charitable thing to assume about this action is that they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were doing.” The renowned urban theorist was convinced that highways wouldn’t just destroy black neighborhoods; they would blight city centers. His remarks at a 1957 urban planning conference in Hartford, Connecticut, launched a small wave of antifreeway sentiment. Critics pointed out that highways simply choked central business districts with traffic they had no capacity to handle. This would just speed up the exodus of businesses and middle-class residents who had already been heading for “streetcar suburbs” for decades. As the New York Times put it: “Autos are strangling cities coast to coast.”

  Strangling, knifing, choking: this assault on cities was not Eisenhower’s vision for the highway program. In fact, historians often claim the president was surprised to discover that freeways were being built in cities at all. In his biography Eisenhower: The President, Stephen Ambrose claims that the revelation came in July of 1959, when the president’s motorcade was stuck in a Washington traffic jam. When an aide told him interstate construction was to blame, a surprised Ike protested that couldn’t be: the interstates were not meant to enter city centers.

  Parts of Ambrose’s biography have been challenged lately, and this story, too, has to be doubted. By mid-1959, Eisenhower already knew that the interstates were plowing into downtowns: earlier that year, he had assigned an advisor to review the program’s role in urban areas. He chose General John Stewart Bragdon, a former West Point classmate, to draw up a report. In June, a month before Ambrose’s traffic jam supposedly happened, Bragdon handed the president a memorandum recommending that the Bureau of Public Roads reroute expressways around central cities. At Eisenhower’s request, Bragdon spent almost a year preparing a report on how to do it. He presented it to Ike in April 1960. Wielding seventeen charts and stacks of documentation, General Bragdon recommended linking transportation to comprehensive land-use planning, developing multimodal mass transit, and allowing states to collect tolls on high-traffic highways—in short, everything progressive planners advocate today.

  Poor Bragdon: his report was doomed. Bertram Tallamy, the federal highway administrator, was also at the meeting. Tallamy was an Eisenhower appointee and a road builder’s road builder. His father and grandfather had been contractors. His mentor was autocratic highway builder Robert Moses, the man known for reshaping New York City with highways. Former chairman of the three-person commission that oversaw the building of the New York Thruway, Tallamy had learned a key lesson from Moses: never brook opposition. He came to Bragdon’s presentation armed only with one thing: a copy of the Yellow Book.

  The Yellow Book was created by the Bureau of Public Roads in 1955, after the highway bill failed in Congress. Officially titled General Location of National System of Interstate Highways Including All Additional Routes at Urban Areas, the booklet contained almost no text: just maps of one hundred American cities with interstate highways bisecting and ringing their cores. Today it’s generally acknowledged that highways are bad for cities, but in 1955, every city wanted them. And the Yellow Book offered them up, showing members of Congress exactly what goodies they could take home to their districts if they passed a highway bill. After it was distributed, every representative o
pposed to the bill, save one, switched sides and voted for highways.

  At the April 1960 meeting, Eisenhower testily declared he had never seen the Yellow Book before that day. Now his aides were saying that the Yellow Book had sold the interstate program in Congress. Was this true? Tallamy assured him that the Yellow Book had been on the desk of every congressional representative when the 1956 highway bill was passed. Like it or not, urban freeways were what Congress had been promised. Eisenhower said he was disappointed, but his hands were tied. A few weeks later, he dissolved Bragdon’s highway advisor position and reassigned his old friend to a nice out-of-the-way post on the Civil Aeronautics Board. The strangling of cities would proceed as planned.

  On page after page in what was called the “Yellow Book,” highway engineers drafted a plan to drive freeways through every urban center in the nation. Few were able to stop the building of “white men’s roads through black men’s bedrooms.” U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955.

  What’s amazing, looking at the Yellow Book today, is how casual it appears, how easily the highway engineers knifed through urban America. The interstates are not numbered or named. There are no explanations. There’s just city after city with heavy black lines scrawled over its core: it looks like highway engineers took Sharpies to an atlas of American cities. And yet, in most cases, the routes are amazingly accurate, as if the planners’ black pens had the alchemy to turn ink into pavement. Atlanta, for instance, is ringed in by an oval: the beltway, I-285, known today as the Perimeter. Bisecting the Perimeter is a swooping line from southwest to northeast: the I-75/I-85 Downtown Connector. And knifing east across Atlanta’s mid-line, from Birmingham toward Augusta, is the highway now known as I-20. I-20 would play a key role in Atlantans’ understanding of why, in the late seventies, their children began to disappear.

  • • • • •

  The interstate program’s transformation of America unfolded with great speed, but in Atlanta it was especially dramatic. By the early sixties, four interstate highways were converging on its downtown in a thirty-two-lane interchange—the largest in the South. Large parts of the city’s black neighborhoods—Mechanicsville, Vine City, Buttermilk Bottoms—were mowed down. About one-third of the city’s existing housing stock was demolished by the highway program and urban renewal; 67,000 residents were displaced, 95 percent of them black. Most were renters, and so went uncompensated. Many had a hard time finding new housing. Priced out of the freeway-accessible middle-class suburbs, they were forced into a smaller and smaller area in the center city. Thousands ended up in the unsavory public housing projects the city was building at the same time. The fifties, sixties, and seventies saw the rapid construction of bland complexes with ironically sunny names: Perry Homes, Harris Homes, Bowen Homes, Hollywood Courts, East Lake Meadows. By the eighties, Atlanta would lead the nation in public housing units per capita. Twelve percent of its population would be tenants of the Atlanta Housing Authority. Many of them ended up there when they were displaced by city projects.

  It was a one-two punch: first highways, then urban renewal. The highways cleared the way to build projects and pack people into them, then isolated the resulting neighborhoods. In a town where planners had once infamously attempted to build a wall dividing black and white neighborhoods, the freeway served as a de facto wall. “The downtown portion of the city’s highway system,” wrote one planning professor, “was configured to eliminate portions of poor black neighborhoods on the east side of downtown, creating a buffer between the central business district and the remnants of the neighborhoods.”

  One area isolated by the downtown freeway was the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. “Sweet Auburn” was declared “the richest negro street in the world” by Forbes in 1956. It was the address of the Atlanta Daily World, one of the nation’s oldest black newspapers; the Odd Fellows building, home to more than 120 black-owned businesses; WERD, the city’s first black-owned radio station; and clubs like the Royal Peacock and the Top Hat, frequented by the likes of B. B. King, Ma Rainey, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. It was the street on which Martin Luther King Jr. was born. But in the early sixties the city insisted on moving I-75/I-85, originally planned for the largely unused railroad right-of-way, to the eastern edge of the central business district. Completed in 1964, the so-called Downtown Connector plowed through the black neighborhoods of Mechanicsville and Summerhill, bisecting Auburn Avenue and mowing down a block of buildings just blocks from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Reverend King and his father both preached. A decade later, a city-commissioned study by the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Architecture reported that the “once vibrant Auburn Avenue street life has essentially disappeared, business activity has declined, and many historic and other structures stand deteriorating and underutilized.” The area, the architects said, might easily be called “a slum.”

  “Sweet Auburn,” once called the “richest Negro street in the world,” today remains blighted by the freeway. Photo by the author.

  • • • • •

  Camille Bell never wanted her children to grow up in the slums. Her father was an engineer. Her mother taught high school science. Bell was a National Merit Scholar who went to college in Tennessee, and then quit college to come to the South and work for civil rights with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was the sixties, a time of immense hope and passion, when it seemed the nation was really changing. Atlanta, for instance, had proven that a Southern city could desegregate peacefully in 1961, when nine black children were enrolled in four previously all-white schools downtown. This wasn’t Little Rock: there were no riots, no National Guard. Atlanta proudly called itself “the city too busy to hate.”

  In the sixties, though, local wags dubbed it the “city too busy moving to hate.” By the time Camille Bell arrived in Atlanta, its center was rapidly being abandoned by the middle class. Throughout the decade, 40 percent of Atlanta’s white population decamped for the leafy suburban enclaves outside the city limits. And it wasn’t just white flight: middle-class blacks moved out as well, to an inner ring of neighborhoods on the city’s fringe.

  Workers in the downtown neighborhoods lost jobs as offices, shops, and factories also migrated to the suburbs. Nineteen suburban office parks sprang up just outside the Perimeter beltway in the sixties alone. Huge corporate office parks like Perimeter Center and shopping malls like the Cumberland Galleria mushroomed near freeway interchanges. They were surrounded by seas of asphalt and poorly serviced by bus, meaning carless city residents couldn’t get to jobs there. And downtown, once highway construction cleared residents out of the way, a new city-within-a-city began to rise. The redeveloped central business district, a shining temple to commerce, was made possible by clearing a roughly twenty-square-block section of “blight”: the old railroad right-of-way and the former Vine City neighborhood. Skyscrapers shot up like weeds: Peachtree Center in 1961, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta in 1967. The economy boomed outside the beltway and a new white-collar paradise was rising in the city center, but in the old neighborhoods unemployment skyrocketed.

  Atlanta’s transformation was not unique; across the nation, urban renewal and expressway construction were doling out misery in the urban cores. Something had to give, and in the summer of 1966 it did. Urban riots broke out across the nation. The press called them “ghetto insurrections.” Atlanta’s happened in Summerhill, one of the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods, settled by freed slaves during Reconstruction. An eclectic community of roughly 12,500 blacks, Jews, and Greeks had occupied the area, but by 1966, all but a small remnant were gone. The majority of its buildings had been razed. The original plan was to create public housing there, but when developers expressed concern about letting poor people live so close to their “new” downtown, the land was reallocated to construction of a stadium for the South’s first major league baseball and football teams.

  As riots go, it was tame. The mayor climbed onto a police car to address the crowd, but p
rotesters rocked it until he fell off. “When they first cleared the land up there,” explained one protester, “they told us they’d put up housing, and then they put up the stadium.” The next summer, another riot broke out in the black neighborhood of Dixie Hills. This time, four people were shot by police. Time magazine pointed out that more than six hundred cheap apartments had been built in Dixie Hills in the previous decade. “Rats and roaches infest every building,” the magazine declared, “plumbing is erratic, owners refuse to make repairs or even plant grass in the dusty, barren areas between buildings. Trash and garbage have been collected irregularly, gaping holes in the streets have gone unrepaired, and recreational facilities have been nonexistent. Most serious, more than half of the younger men are unemployed.”

  Riots spread across the nation. In Detroit that summer, rioting killed forty-three people and burned down much of the urban core. Michigan’s governor, George Romney, a former automotive executive, declared that urban renewal and freeway construction were partly to blame. The Motor City never recovered from its freeway revolt. Cities such as Newark, Chicago, and Washington, DC, also suffered riots in the late sixties that were sparked in part by the highway program—“white men’s roads through black men’s bedrooms”—and urban renewal, or as the black community renamed it, “negro removal.” By 1968, even the Saturday Evening Post decried the “racial double standard” in the interstate highway program.

  In his 1970 book Highways to Nowhere, cultural critic Richard Hébert profiled the damage highways were inflicting on a number of cities, including Atlanta. The city had grown, he said, but “blacks found themselves receiving at best the crumbs of the new progress” because the best jobs had left the center. Without transit, the black population was trapped in a decaying downtown. “While highways and automobiles may not be destroying the urban cores of the nation single-handedly,” Hébert concluded, “they most certainly are dealing them the cruelest blow.”