Nikole Hanna-Jones: 1619 Project, “Traffic” Notes and Summary by Kevin M. Kruse  

1. The traffic problems in Atlanta stem directly from the long-time effort of the city to separate the races into segregated housing. (p. 405)
   • The abolition of slavery brought a shift to White America’s need to keep Blacks in certain places.  After slavery, whites had no need to maintain constant watch over African Americans.  Now they wanted them out of sight.
   • Public and private forces—city planners, local and state elected officials, federal housing program administrators, mortgage bankers, and real estate brokers—worked together to push African Americans into ghettos.
   • Southern cities like Baltimore and Louisville enacting laws that mandated residential racial segregation.
2. After the Supreme Court outlawed such overt racial districting
   • The FHA fostered redlining by banks by deeming which areas were wise investments for loans and insurance.
   • The postwar programs for urban renewal, for instance, destroyed Black neighborhoods and displaced their residents.
   • The interstate system, funded primarily by the Federal Government often cut roads through poor neighborhoods.
     • “Blighted areas” just happened to be populated by Blacks
     • Atlanta’s Auburn Ave, a prosperous Black business center, was devastated by a freeway
3. Roads as barriers
   • Atlanta’s I-75; I-85: Black neighborhoods, he hoped, would be hemmed in on one side of the new expressway, while white neighborhoods on the other side of it would be protected.
   • Often, after the racial neighborhood patterns, usually, when Whites move further out into the suburbs, the awkward road system remains.
4. New Suburbs
   • Whites moving into new neighborhoods overburden poorly conceived road systems
   • White residents resisted allowing the mass transit system MARTA from running into their neighborhood.  The not so implicit intent is to keep Blacks confined in the city center.
   • In Atlanta, Cobb and Gwinnet counties exploded with growth.  For Blacks in the inner city who didn’t own a car, there was no way to travel to these new places for work.
   • Atlanta’s traffic is at a standstill because its attitude about transit is at a standstill

Summary Chapter 16: “Traffic” Kevin M. Kruse

This chapter shows how neighborhood planning, road building, and the razing of some communities, and growth of newer areas, America has been left with segregated housing and an illogical byzantine road system.  The problem in Atlanta, as in many cities is exacerbated when populous White suburbs resist mass transit, which would give Black residents access to jobs and shopping in the newer areas.