This was not an unintended consequence; this was the whole point. As highway lobbyist Alfred Johnson later told an interviewer, some city officials in the mid-1950s were blunt about the goals of highway planning: “Urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’” ... Today, I-4, State Road 408 and various ramps form the loop that encapsulates Griffin Park within an “oval of pollution,” said Robert Cassanello, a history professor at the University of Central Florida. “The developments, and the plans to revitalize the city, were at the cost and risk of African-American residents.”
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