Wooster Avenue: Black Akron and the Freeway That Erased It
Near Akron, Ohio
For much of the twentieth century, Wooster Avenue was the center of Black commercial and social life in Akron. The street ran through a neighborhood where residents could find groceries, tailors, barbers, doctors, lawyers, and bars all owned and operated by Black Akronites. It was the kind of self-sufficient community that Black Americans built wherever segregation forced them to build it.
Akron's Black community had grown substantially during the Great Migration, as workers from the American South arrived to fill the rubber plant jobs that were expanding rapidly in the nineteen tens and twenties. They settled in neighborhoods on the city's north and west sides, facing the same pattern of restriction encountered in cities across the industrial Midwest: redlining from federal lending programs that marked Black neighborhoods as financial risks, limiting access to mortgages and business loans.
In the nineteen sixties, city planners drew the route of a new freeway. The Akron Innerbelt would cut directly through the Wooster Avenue commercial corridor. Beginning in nineteen seventy, construction displaced at least seven hundred thirty-seven households and shuttered more than a hundred businesses. The payments property owners received through eminent domain were generally insufficient to restart elsewhere. And when they tried to relocate, discriminatory lending policies often blocked them from getting loans in other neighborhoods.
The records of what was lost are incomplete. The businesses, the churches, the social clubs, the professional networks that had sustained the community across generations, much of it did not survive the displacement. The freeway that replaced it went largely unused for years and was never completed as designed.
The records here go quiet in ways that reflect a deliberate policy choice. What happened on Wooster Avenue was not unique to Akron: the same story played out in city after city across America, routed by the same federal highway program, producing the same result.
