Posted on 07/07/2019 4:57:57 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
In 1965, Mary Jane McGuire, her husband Cyril and their three children received a letter from the Michigan State Highway Department. It informed them that their Lansing home, where the family had lived for the past decade, would be demolished to make way for construction of Interstate 496. The letter was followed by an offer of federal dollars to purchase their property, a number the McGuires felt was far below its actual value.
The couple’s initial refusal to accept the offer meant they were one of the final families of their African-American neighborhood to be displaced for construction of the interstate. Forced relocation led to an equally daunting challenge: The first offer the McGuires made for a new home was rejected because of their race. They ultimately purchased property in a neighborhood of mainly white residents — a handful of whom left upon news of a black family moving in — less than nine weeks before the state tore down the family house.
“It wasn’t what we expected,” McGuire says. “We had not expected that a highway would come through and our home would be destroyed, that what we designed for ourselves would be destroyed.”
McGuire is now 94 years old. Her story is one of many being told as part of Pave The Way, a citywide project to assess what was lost upon construction of Lansing’s crosstown expressway.
Between 1963 and 1970, over 840 houses and businesses along the St. Joseph-Main Street corridor near downtown Lansing were demolished for I-496. Starting this summer, a range of exhibits prompt the city to acknowledge, honor and discuss this history of displacement fueled by racism.
(Excerpt) Read more at nextcity.org ...
Any history on the white people displaced?
I am going to bet the vast majority.
The entire article makes no sense and has zero value unless everyone is expected to build shrines where someone that was black, lived.
Mother & I had to move from a rental in Beaverdam, Ohio due to construction on I-75 back in 1963. Nice brick house, full basement and 2 car garage. Got knocked flat and paved over. Drag...
Those Mich. cities that were GM divisional HQs are now sad places.
Flint [Buick]
Lansing [Oldsmobile]
Pontiac [Pontiac & GM Truck and Bus]
Detroit [Cadillac]
"Between 1963 and 1970, over 840 houses and businesses along the St. Joseph-Main Street corridor near downtown Lansing were demolished for I-496."
I really wish someone here in the SF Bay Area would do some similar project on what the Grove-Shafter Freeway (Route 24) did to Oakland. Out of all the freeways built here, I think this is the one that destroyed the greatest proportion of residential neighborhoods (as opposed to industrial neighborhoods or uninhabited areas). Jeff Norman in his Temescal Legacies book touched on the subject but not extensively. I'd read someone from the San Francisco Chronicle was looking into writing a book but I have not seen it.
I must be tough to design a highway based on just the racial makeup of those in its path. How are you going to build a road to a specific location when there are no minority homes in the way? Engineering sounds hard.
The obvious conclusion here is that highways are racist.
No.
The big meme being pushed here for obvious libtard reasonsmis that everything done in this country before the civil rights act was racist.
They are trying to disconnect the country from its founders and its founding principles. On purpose.
Bump
Massachusetts lost 4 towns for. the Quabbin Reservoir...all under water.
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