The Highway That Ate a Community

After emancipation, Black Dallasites built a neighborhood in North Dallas. It had a name that varied in the records, sometimes Freedmen Town, sometimes Freedmantown, but its character was consistent: a self-sustaining community with churches, Black-owned businesses, schools, insurance societies, and civic organizations concentrated along corridors that formed the center of Black life in the city.

This community survived the violence of Jim Crow Texas. It survived two world wars and the depression between them. What it did not survive was a freeway.

In the nineteen forties, city planners in Dallas chose the routing for Central Expressway, one of the first urban freeway projects in Texas. They had multiple options. The routing they selected ran directly through the Freedmen Town neighborhood. The African American Museum of Dallas holds archival materials documenting the period, and those materials are clear that the alternative routings were known. The planners chose the one that displaced Black residents and Black businesses over alternatives that would have displaced white residents and white businesses instead.

More than fifteen hundred residents lost their homes. The physical infrastructure of the community, the churches, the storefronts, the schools built during the decades when Black Dallasites were denied access to white institutions, was demolished. What replaced it was a freeway that served commuters.

The pattern was not unique to Dallas. The same deliberate routing of postwar urban freeways through Black communities was documented in Atlanta, Memphis, Los Angeles, Detroit, and dozens of other cities. It was policy, and it was consistent enough to be called intentional.

The African American Museum of Dallas at Fair Park holds what survives of the record of what was lost here.