Route Fifty
By Daniel C. Vock,
DECEMBER 12, 2022
In places like Tulsa and New Orleans, community advocates are pushing for interstates that split apart Black communities to be torn down. But public agencies are floating more modest plans as they look to tap funding from a new federal program. The recent 100-year anniversary commemorations of the Tulsa Race Massacre brought national attention to the grave injustices the city’s Greenwood neighborhood has faced for years. A white mob killed as many as 300 Black residents there in 1921, while looting and burning most of the area to ground. It was one of the most violent episodes of racist terrorism in the U.S. since slavery. Remarkably, that’s not what spelled the end of economic vibrance for the area that became known—after the massacre—as Black Wall Street. The Black residents of Oklahoma’s second-biggest city rebuilt Greenwood into a bustling commercial district, despite active opposition from Tulsa’s white leaders. Then the highways came. Greenwood sits at the northeast corner of a rectangle of highways that surround downtown Tulsa. Interstate 244, an east-west road, cleaves Greenwood in two, bringing the noise and pollution of 75,000 vehicles a day over a viaduct where homes and businesses once stood.
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