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From Racial Zoning to Community Empowerment

The Interstate Highway System and the African American Community in Birmingham, Alabama

This article shows how Birmingham’s interstate highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city’s 1926 racial zoning law. It shows how the construction of interstate highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial change. Finally, the article shows how the city’s black community moved from a position of quietly protesting the interstate highway system to one in which a black neighborhood forced government to alter plans that would have destroyed a section of a predominantly black public housing project. In so doing, the article shows how black neighborhoods, over time, moved from a position of adapting to the racial aspects of various planning tools to one in which they sought to modify these tools so that they would benefit, or at least not harm, the black community.

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