NEWS
Illustration by Ali Bachmann
HOW THE BUILDING OF I-43 DESTROYED MILWAUKEE’S BLACK COMMUNITY By Michael Carriere
F
ew developments have been more important to the evolution of Milwaukee than the region’s highway system. The construction of Interstate 94 (I-94) and Interstate 43 (I-43) throughout the 1960s brought a newfound sense of mobility to the residents of metropolitan Milwaukee. As more and more individuals bought cars, the highway came to symbolize both modernity and movement. Milwaukeeans, like others across the nation, were a people on the move by the mid-1960s.
city itself, remarkably convenient. Over the late 20th century, both people and businesses used these transportation networks to migrate to these burgeoning suburbs, with each taking valuable tax dollars with them. Such movements signaled the onset of a fiscal crisis in Milwaukee, a development that hurt those that couldn’t make the move to suburbia, namely the city’s growing African American population. Communities of color were left to deal with the repercussions of such acts of divestment.
For many such individuals, these highways made the migration to the city’s suburbs, and travel between such places and the
These very same communities of color—often portrayed, through the use of variety of racist tropes, as “blighted” sections of
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Shepherd Express
the cities that highways allowed affluent whites to avoid—also suffered when it came to where these transportation routes were to be placed. As longtime Milwaukee housing activist Jeff Eagan points out, highway planners “targeted the African-American community, where the political clout was the weakest.” In other words, these highways had to be built somewhere—and that somewhere was often right through North Side, African American neighborhoods. Estimates suggest that the construction of I-43 throughout the 1960s led to the demolition of roughly 17,000 homes and close to 1,000 businesses.
