Such laws were eventually invalidated by the Supreme Court, but later measures achieved the same effect by more subtle means. Civic planners pushed them into ghettos, and the segregation we know today became the rule.Īt first the rule was overt, as Southern cities like Baltimore and Louisville enacted laws that mandated residential racial segregation. Once they had no need to keep constant watch over African-Americans, whites wanted them out of sight. But with the abolition of slavery, the spatial relationship was reversed. Before the Civil War, white masters kept enslaved African-Americans close at hand to coerce their labor and guard against revolts. In Atlanta, as in dozens of cities across America, daily congestion is a direct consequence of a century-long effort to segregate the races.įor much of the nation’s history, the campaign to keep African-Americans “in their place” socially and politically manifested itself in an effort to keep them quite literally in one place or another. Commuters might assume they’re stuck there because some city planner made a mistake, but the heavy congestion actually stems from a great success.
ATLANTA TRAFFIC DRIVERS
Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, from the constantly clogged Georgia 400 to a complicated cluster of overpasses at Tom Moreland Interchange, better known as “Spaghetti Junction.” The Downtown Connector - a 12-to-14-lane megahighway that in theory connects the city’s north to its south - regularly has three-mile-long traffic jams that last four hours or more. Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States.
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