Weary-eyed and feeling all of her 85 years, Hattie Anderson doesn’t want to fight anymore.
For most of her life, she held on to the large plot of land that she and her late husband Samuel pinched pennies to buy — even after the state ran a freeway through their mostly Black community, after the city used eminent domain to take nearly nine acres for a sewage drain, and after the state added a beltway. But now, as state officials plan another major road expansion, Anderson is offering to sell them her land and leave.
“If they don’t take my house,” she said, “I’m going to be just in a little corner, in a little hole by myself. Where I am, it’s like a dead end.”
The dismantling of Black communities for state and federal highways is not just a thing of the past. It’s happening now a few miles north of Charleston with the proposed West I-526 Lowcountry Corridor, at a time when President Biden and his transportation secretary have vowed to stop it.
South Carolina is proposing to sweep aside dozens of homes, and potentially hundreds of people, to widen a freeway interchange choked with traffic in this booming coastal region. The $3 billion project is expected to begin about two years after the plan becomes final.
This 1957 aerial photograph shows the neighborhoods of Liberty Park and Highland Terrace in North Charleston prior to the construction of a freeway in 1969. At the time of the freeway construction, these neighborhoods were majority-Black, according to residents and state officials.
In the decades since this photo was taken, two freeways cutting through the neighborhoods have displaced dozens of buildings – homes, churches, businesses. “Low-income and minority residents felt they were not properly informed or assisted with relocation,” the state wrote in a community impact assessment.
Today, Highland Terrace is separated from Liberty Park by lanes of traffic, sandwiched between the massive freeway interchange and the nearby airport.
History is about to repeat itself: South Carolina’s preferred plan to expand the freeway interchange would result in the demolition or relocation of nearly 100 homes and businesses.
If Charleston County has its way, the roadbuilding and housing destruction would not stop in North Charleston. In late August, officials unveiled a separate, $720 million plan for an expressway to begin near the expanded beltway and extend south to rural Johns Island and suburban James Island. Both places contain historic African American enclaves, where formerly enslaved people spread out from a nearby plantation in the 1870s.