Pleasant Hill and the Interstate

Pleasant Hill is the neighborhood on the hill west of downtown where Little Richard Penniman grew up, where the Pentecostal churches that shaped his voice stood, where an established African American professional and working-class community had built itself over generations through segregation and into the mid-twentieth century. It is also the neighborhood where Interstate Seventy-Five arrived.

Urban renewal and the interstate highway program that the federal government funded through the nineteen fifties and sixties were not neutral infrastructure projects in their effects on American cities. Across the South, across the country, the routes selected for new highways moved through Black neighborhoods with a frequency that planners and historians have since documented extensively. Communities that could not afford legal representation, that lacked political voice to redirect the routes, and that faced the compounding pressures of segregation-era redlining and disinvestment were the ones most likely to find a federal road coming through their front yards.

In Macon, the completion of the Interstate Seventy-Five and Sixteen junction in the nineteen sixties split and displaced portions of Pleasant Hill. Homes were demolished. Community institutions that had anchored the neighborhood for decades lost their immediate geography. The specific numbers and block-by-block documentation of what was lost in Pleasant Hill require research beyond what public sources presently provide in detail, and this track acknowledges that gap rather than filling it with approximation.

What is documented: a community that produced Little Richard and sustained the cultural and civic life that made Macon's music scene possible was substantially altered by infrastructure decisions made elsewhere. The hill is still there. The neighborhood has resilience. But the full story of what Interstate Seventy-Five cost Pleasant Hill is one that local historians, not this audio track, are best equipped to tell.