As detailed by Gilbert Estrada in “ If You Build It, They Will Move,” mixed-race Boyle Heights was gutted by freeways. Local officials rerouted the elaborate designs of freeway engineers - often at considerable expense - to destroy thousands of homes in racially diverse communities.
Highway race icon glue full#
When the 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act allocated funds for 1,938 miles of freeways in California, planners used the opportunity, with full federal support, to obliterate as much as possible the casual mingling of the races. The city then turned the land into a whites-only park.īut neither the Klan nor legally dubious covenants nor flagrantly unconstitutional land grabs were arguably as effective as the automobile and its attendant infrastructure at turning Los Angeles into an intentionally segregated city. Then there was Manhattan Beach, which seized the homes of every African American property owner in town by eminent domain and razed them.
Bombings, cross burnings and even drive-by shootings were largely successful in keeping people of color out of “white” communities like Eagle Rock in northeast Los Angeles. These efforts took many forms - most famously racially restrictive covenants, which barred African Americans and other ethnic minorities by deed from living in houses and neighborhoods deemed “white.” Where covenants failed to keep the races separate and unequal, rising Ku Klux Klan violence targeted African American families who attempted to integrate.
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