Perspective: Infrastructure has a long history of cloaking racism and preventing justice
granddaddy of bipartisan infrastructure compromises. “Red” neighborhoods, home to millions of African Americans, were also home to systematic real estate devaluation and dispossession. The Home Owners Loan Corp. gave out nearly $3 billion in loans for the purposes of refinancing mortgages, paying delinquent taxes and making home repairs and improvements.
None of the burdens placed on Black America represented unforeseen costs. They originated in political calculations.Consider the experience of Dicie Griffith, a 77-year-old Black woman who, in 1942, owned a small farm in Harriman, Tenn., just west of Knoxville. According to local reports, Griffith had her eight-acre farm snatched away for an amountless than its value. White agents wielding federal dollars under-appraised and grabbed her land by forging her signature.
Infrastructure’s racial magic was perhaps at its strongest in the 1950s and 1960s. That period saw a courageous movement against racism swell up, met by an equally sustained effort to tamp it down. While much of the struggle occurred in the legal arena or in the theater of public opinion, some White Americans’ defense of “tradition” devolved into political violence and threatened local economies.
The White South also purchased Black buy-in with promises that infrastructure projects would ease racial integration and sweep away Southern slumlords. The U.S. Interstate Highway System and urban renewal did not reach the far corners of the Jim Crow South until the Black Freedom Struggle entered its most massive direct action phase. That’s not a coincidence.
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