It happened quite frequently, for instance when constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. Somehow it’s always easiest to demolish vibrant black neighborhoods.
Somehow yeah
The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn't go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.
And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.
And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.
St. Louis arch
The Dunsmuir Viaduct in Vancouver, BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Alley,_Vancouver
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol' boys in the 1960s.
"Nothing changes, even when it wants to" Hayes Carll
75\85?
275
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
So?
So there would be no time for Americans to learn about other countries and the advantages of the metric system. Oh.. wait... never mind.
From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would "not be forgotten"
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
And for Latinx people in LA it is being evicted from their homes to make Dodger Stadium
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Africatown Mobile, Alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africatown
In recent years they've done an archeology mission to find the Clotilda.
was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States.
So as I remember the story--and perhaps the references in the article will be more accurate, bur a slaver made a bet with somebody that he could still traffick slaves after it became illegal. He arrived in Mobile, AL with slaves on his boat and went to collect on his bet. He left the crew with instructions to burn the ship and everyone on board (i.e. get rid of the evidence) if he did not return. And that's what they did. The people who founded Africatown escaped the fire.
The Wiki article says similar, but that the slaves were removed before scuttling the ship. Good if true, I guess. My memory isn't great.
Edit: typos
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It's is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: "[..] or tear it down - and start again."
To add to y'all's reading list:
Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport
Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013
And let us not forget the Vanport flood, which the Portland authorities downplayed for decades and used as an excuse to pave over a vibrant community to make a raceway and a golf course. They only recently admitted that there was ‘some’ loss of life.
Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could
This is currently happening, right now, in Knoxville, Tennessee and Nashville, Tennessee
It's very similar to how a lot of Americans didn't know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.
I didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre until the first Trump term. I'm over 50 years old.
WTF
Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).
Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
I grew up a block away from Seneca village and only found out about it as an adult when they put up signage in the park telling its story.
Moreover, this was never mentioned in FRIENDS. That TV show full of certain ppl where central park was like a gag in the show somehow. Lame
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain't teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times
On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain't teaching
Should have seen my face when re-watching The Pitt, getting to the part of the pacemaker/first paramedics arc. Opening wikipedia and being blown away by what I learnt.
But no, let's keep the fact that "black people invented peanut butter" as the cool fact. Not "black people helped standardise first aid"...
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
Probably Europe too. It just played out over a longer time, which made it less pronounced, and more forgotten.
The more recent the theft the more it features in our indignation. Palestine > Americas > Europe.
This doesn't mean by the way that what happened in the Americas or Palestine is any less bad. Colonizers are eager to say: "look it happened before, look it happens elsewhere." But fuck them.
In fact it makes their crimes worse. Every time lessons are not learned the responsibility increases.
It only strengthens the case for the universal fight to redistribute what has been stolen.
Thieves, murderers and rapists. Absolute scum of the earth. They must be fully ostracized.
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
There's a town near me that was a black settlement from that period. Now it's white suburbia.
Portland, Oregon did this with a hospital too
https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/16/portland-oregon-affordable-housing-reparations/
Reminds me of Watchmen teaching a lot of Oklahomans about their black wall street.
And that I never heard a peep of this in any high school or college history class?
I mean... Unless you were taking some sort of graduate-level course focusing on events like this, why would you? It's a really interesting story, but it was a village of 225 people in a city of about one million that lasted 30 years, and its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. Seizures of predominantly black neighborhoods for public works projects are a dime a dozen in US history, and there are a million other topics to choose from like the Tulsa race massacre if you want noteworthy material about black oppression in the US for a high school or undergraduate level course. At best this would be an incidental two-sentence mention as a piece of trivia from a particularly knowledgeable teacher.
"Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject. More at 11."
You know this person already agrees with you right? Insulting their knowledge doesn't do much to make them want to know more.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past. Not that it's the only place in the US with such a history, just one of the most popular. So one would imagine that with such popularity, it's dark history would be familiar instead of buried like it is elsewhere in the country.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what's underneath.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past.
"such a dark past" is a pretty wild exaggeration of a total of about 1600 evictions for its construction. Central Park's early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history. It's dark-ish, but dark enough to stand out from the US' past otherwise? Not even close. Central Park isn't such a huge topic that you'd expect, in a high school or undergraduate-level gen-ed course, to learn what constitutes a paragraph in its fairly extensive Wikipedia article.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what’s underneath.
Anyone can. It's right there. It's mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead of the Wikipedia article. Anyone even slightly interested in Central Park's history will find this. Not teaching this in an undergruate-level gen-ed isn't buried history; it just means it's not significant enough for the general public to care.
Insulting their knowledge doesn’t do much to make them want to know more.
Anyone who would expect this to be part of the curriculum of the courses the OP is describing is completely delusional. I don't really care what pointing that out makes them want to do or not.
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