Hayti Built Over

The neighborhood called Hayti, pronounced HAY-tie, was founded by formerly enslaved people who had walked off nearby plantations after emancipation and built a city within a city south of downtown Durham. By its peak in the nineteen thirties and forties, the Fayetteville Street corridor held barbershops and beauty parlors, pharmacies, funeral homes, law offices, a hospital, two movie theaters, a YMCA, printing houses, and churches so prominent that W.E.B. Du Bois came twice to praise what had been built. More than two hundred Black-owned businesses operating in a single neighborhood. A community that had made itself because it was excluded from everywhere else.

In the nineteen fifties, the Durham Redevelopment Commission began planning urban renewal for the area. Federal highway funding was available. A freeway needed a route. The route they chose went directly through Hayti.

The Durham Freeway, North Carolina Highway One Forty-Seven, broke ground in phases beginning in the early nineteen sixties. As sections of the road went up, businesses that had stood for decades found their access streets torn apart. The isolation was lethal. A business that cannot be reached cannot be patronized. The Redevelopment Commission promised displaced residents it would rebuild the community after the freeway was complete. It did not. Approximately five hundred businesses and four thousand families were displaced. Most of the businesses never reopened. Most of the families never returned.

What was left of Hayti was separated from downtown Durham by a raised highway that carries traffic directly overhead. The air quality beneath and adjacent to the freeway has been documented by a City of Durham study as significantly worse than surrounding areas, with higher rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and childhood leukemia among residents. The median household income for Hayti's census tract is just over eighteen thousand dollars a year. Land values in the surrounding area rose one hundred thirty-three percent between two thousand sixteen and two thousand twenty-one.

The Hayti Heritage Center operates in the former St. Joseph's African Methodist Episcopal Church, the one building that survived. The freeway runs past the front door.