← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · confederate_commando
Thread ID: 18330 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-05-21
2005-05-21 15:44 | User Profile
I-20/59 route did the job Klan started
It rips and separates the city, they say. It's ugly and inefficient and dangerous, and it discourages visitors to the BJCC from making the short hike into Birmingham's cultural district.
But could it all be the Ku Klux Klan's fault?
Perhaps.
There is evidence, some historians say, that the interstate routes were chosen to target specific civil rights workers' homes.
If bombs wouldn't work, bulldozers might.
It wouldn't be surprising, said Raymond Mohl, a UAB history professor who has written extensively on links between racism and interstate routes. You see, state highway departments got the job of deciding the routes in the 1950s, when federal interstate money began to flow.
There was politics and patronage everywhere, but Alabama was special. The state's highway director was Sam Englehardt, who also happened to be a member of the Klan and the White Citizens Council, Mohl said.
The interstates became a weapon. Plans for Birmingham's interstate system in 1960 called for wiping out two black communities, three black schools and 13 churches, Mohl found. Even a federal highway administrator acknowledged the destruction of Birmingham's black community seemed to be a "planned event," Mohl wrote.
Birmingham Historical Society Director Marjorie White won't go so far as to blame racism for the interstate path. It did, after all, rip apart all kinds of neighborhoods in Birmingham. She will, however, say several condemnations in the racially charged area known as "Dynamite Hill" were at least "highly coincidental."
A home owned by civil rights legends John and Addine Drew, where Martin Luther King and Joseph Lowery visited frequently, was taken by I-59/20. The late Mrs. Drew always believed the house was targeted, White said.
The interstate also claimed two houses "that had repeatedly been the target of Klan violence," she said.
A home at 1100 Center St. West had been bombed three times. The house at 1104 Center St. had been bombed in 1950, and burned by Klansmen in 1951, White said.
The Klan couldn't finish them off. The interstate did.
Now Birmingham has before it a plan to eliminate the raised I-20/59 downtown, to dig a trench and put it underground. Planners have a multitude of reasons for liking the idea, and preservationist Linda Nelson sums them up well: "In my book, that's the only thing that will save Birmingham's vitality and re-knit downtown with its neighborhoods again."
And why not? The freeway will need replacing soon, anyway.
It's a good plan, but that doesn't mean it will sell in Birmingham.
So now there's a secondary argument for knocking down that beastly highway.
It just might be a vestige of racism.
[url]http://www.al.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/1115889384192720.xml?birminghamnews?cnjarch&coll=2[/url]
2005-05-27 08:49 | User Profile
confederate_commando,
Nice to see in one case the destruction caused by a freeway did some public good.