It’s 1956, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower just signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Across the nation, urban planners from dozens of cities faced a tough choice as they considered where to send the bulldozers:
Which neighborhoods would they tear down?
For the filmmakers behind “Interstate,” a documentary getting its world premiere at the Miami Film Festival on Friday night, the choice those planners made didn’t seem tough at all. Throughout the U.S., government officials sent cranes to thriving Black and minority neighborhoods, ripping communities apart for the sake of increasing transportation.
According to co-directors and Miami natives Oscar Corral and Haleem Muhsin, the documentary started as a short film about the cultural damage that occurred when I-95 plowed through Overtown. But soon, research would lead them to realize that what happened to Overtown had not been an isolated or abnormal event.
“This happened in many, many cities all across the country,” Corral said. “It wasn't just two or three or five or 10. In fact, we documented more than 60 cases in the biggest cities across the United States where this happened.”
They narrowed the documentary’s focus to five cities: Miami, Baltimore, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Montgomery, Alabama.
“They all have one thing in common, which is that the highway was rammed through African American Black neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, and people were displaced,” Corral said. “Families and communities broken up. People impoverished, not just by the people being removed, but also, once left behind, having a devalued property because a highway runs through the neighborhood now.”
Hear from the filmmakers
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and Miami-Dade Commissioner Eileen Higgins are hosting the world premiere for INTERSTATE at the Miami Film Festival. Following the film, Higgins will moderate a discussion with the filmmakers.
IF YOU GO
What: INTERSTATE at the Miami Film Festival
When: 6;45 p.m. Friday, April 4
Where: SilverSpot Cinema, Room 13, 300 SE 3rd St., #100, Miami, FL 33131
More Info: miamifilmfestival.com
Documenting the destruction
The two filmmakers have their theories as to why it was so easy for planners to demolish Black and minority neighborhoods, not daring to disrupt those that were white.
“I think they saw the path of least resistance. Because of Jim Crow laws and segregation, there was really no Black political representation in the United States, especially in these cities, so they didn't have leaders to turn to to fight for them,” Corral said.
According to Muhsin, the construction resulted in the exploitation of Black families and the loss of generational wealth.
“When developers came to the doors of these individuals and said that, ‘Hey, we're gonna bring a highway through your neighborhood and you actually have to move, and here's this check,’” Muhsin said, residents felt helpless. He added that the compensation, “was literally pennies on the dollar for what their property value actually was worth.”
He said that many Black families didn’t know then that they could contest the eminent domain rulings by law.
“They didn't know that they could actually challenge those checks, or even that action itself.”
Aside from financial losses, the interstates also brought significant health concerns. Muhsin said the exhaust from thousands of vehicles and particulates floating in the air above their communities led to asthma and, in some cases, cancer in residents. The filmmakers interviewed scientists who said these health factors could be tied to families’ proximity to highways.
Still, Corral and Muhsin were aware that making a film solely about concrete highways would be a tough sell, so they searched for interview subjects affected by the new roads in an effort to humanize the story.
One of the interview subjects was Tina Brown, the CEO of the Overtown Youth Center, whose familial roots in the historically Black community go back decades.
“She was brought up in that neighborhood, from a young, young girl, and her family has been there. Generations of her family have been here for quite some time,” Muhsin said. “And she honestly was not very happy because what she knew as a child is no longer there now as an adult. That house that she grew up in is no longer there. The majority of her family has been displaced. When she talks about enjoying her city of Overtown, she looks at the re-gentrification, and it's like she feels like she's a guest in her own city at times.”
Muhsin’s perceived “silver lining” is that now, with the Overtown Youth Center, Brown is able to provide job opportunities and youth programs to her neighbors in her community.
Nobody to Fight
When asked whether there was a city in which the white neighborhoods were targeted instead, Corral said indeed there were two: Baltimore and New Orleans. In both cities, the plans still included sending highways through Black neighborhoods before they’d snake their ways into white areas as well.
Only it didn’t turn out that way in the end.
“The white neighborhoods rallied; they organized and they fought it and they beat it,” Corral said. “In New Orleans, the highway that ended up cutting through Tremé was supposed to be extended into the French Quarter. They fought a pitched battle and stopped it from going into the French Quarter, but it didn't stop from going into Tremé.”
He said the same thing happened to a planned highway in Baltimore.
“It was supposed to continue into a white neighborhood that was more … upscale, wealthier, and the white people there rallied, organized and stopped it,” Corral said. “And so it never connected to I-95 which is what it was supposed to do. There were very few Black lawyers back then who could fight this, so they didn't have the weapons, the legal weapons and organizing weapons to fight the way they can today.”
Looking for Reparations
Corral said the documentary explores possible remedies to past harms, but he isn’t clear on how well they would work.
“Over the past few years, there was a federal policy passed called ‘Reconnecting Communities,’ which aims to help mitigate the negative effects of infrastructure on minority and Black communities by trying to quote, unquote, reconnect them,” Corral said. “That could mean anything from building a metro line from the downtown area out to where they were forced to move to, or new bus routes, new parks, new subway lines. So there’s that possibility.”
Still, he expressed doubt.
“We never really got an exact, clear answer as to what all these projects were and how they were supposed to reconnect people,” Corral said. “And there's some questions about that that we raise in our film, but that's one example of a policy that has the intention of trying to help.”
After its Miami premiere, “Interstate” will likely head to film festivals located in the other cities spotlighted in the film. Corral said he’s optimistic about audience reaction.
“I think they're going to take away a little bit of surprise, a little bit of outrage and a little bit of hope, and also maybe a call to action to at least understand that this is not a problem from history — it's a problem that's still ongoing, and that it has possible solutions.”
This story was produced by The Miami Times, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, as part of a content sharing partnership with the WLRN newsroom. Read more at miamitimesonline.com.
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