LITTLE ROCK: I-630
Little Rock, before-and-after the construction of I-630. The Arkansas Highway Department cut 630 through the prosperous heart of Little Rock’s Black community, centered around W. 9th St., eliminating hundreds of Black-owned businesses and displacing thousands. After puncturing through the city’s core, the highway continued west into undeveloped land, using publicly-funded infrastructure to facilitate the growth of new, privately-developed, automobile-dependent suburbs. In Little Rock as in much of the country, these new suburbs contained racial covenants in their deeds, preventing sale to anybody considered non-white. The effect of the highway was the destruction of Black wealth and community in the city center, and white flight to the new suburbs along the highway in what had previously been undeveloped land.
Little Rock today remains sharply segregated, the legacy of these policies. The suburbs along the western end of the highway are still mostly white, while in the core of the city the highway serves as a racial dividing line. Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic, “Little Rock is a predominantly Black and poor city to the south of I-630, but it’s a white and affluent town north of I-630 and west of I-430.”
In many ways, Little Rock’s story is a textbook example of how highway construction has been used as a tool of segregation through suburbanization. Despite being officially part of the Interstate system, the highway does not provide any sort of regional or long-distance connections; rather, it is a local route located entirely within Little Rock, connecting between the suburbs and the historic core. Community leaders at the time accused the Highway Department (now ArDOT) of planning the highway not just for transportation, but for segregation. “This Interstate will be a racial divider, with Blacks only allowed housing mobility south of Interstate 630 from Downtown westward to University,” noted the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now. “Workers may save three minutes getting to and from places of employment, but the fact remains that the Interstate itself will cause downtown businesses to move to the western suburbs.”
David Koon noted in a 2011 Arkansas Times article that, when constructing 630, “planners went out of their way to preserve ‘white’ landmarks, even as large swaths of the historically Black section of downtown were bulldozed.” In short, the effect of 630 was threefold:
The destruction of Black wealth and community which the W. 9th St. district physically embodied.
The further segregation of the existing core of Little Rock through the creation of a barrier between what was considered the more desirable housing closer to Downtown, and the increasingly Black areas south of Downtown (including the district around Little Rock Central High, location of the infamous Little Rock 9 incident). Today, virtually the same house will sell for vastly different amounts due its presence either north or south of the highway.
White flight through the promotion of publicly-subsidized, automobile-based, and racially-restricted suburban sprawl.
For more on the history and legacy of I-630, check out Acadia Roher’s excellent piece entitled “Expansion or Segregation."