The Highway That Divided a City

There is a lesson that was taught over and over in American cities during the nineteen fifties and sixties, and Winston-Salem learned it at full cost.

When federal highway money became available after the Interstate Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six, city planners across the country faced a choice about where to route the new roads. In city after city, the answer was the same: through the neighborhoods where Black families lived, neighborhoods where property values were lower, where political resistance was weaker, where the cost of displacing people could be minimized on a spreadsheet.

In Winston-Salem, the construction of the US Highway Fifty-Two expressway in the early nineteen sixties ran a high-speed corridor just east of downtown, cutting into East Winston-Salem's Black neighborhoods and the commercial district that had served Black Winston-Salem for generations. Urban renewal projects simultaneously designated Black neighborhoods as slums and used federal funds to demolish homes.

The pattern was self-reinforcing. Once the commercial district was cleared, the economic anchor of the community was gone. Residents displaced to other parts of the city lost the networks of church, mutual aid, and neighborhood commerce that had held things together. Home values in the affected areas dropped. Investment did not follow.

In the decades since, home values in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of east Winston-Salem have lagged far behind values in other parts of the city.

The roads are still there. The gap between east and west Winston-Salem, measured in income, life expectancy, and investment, is still there. What was done in the nineteen fifties and sixties is still a fact in twenty twenty-six.