Citizen Activism and Freeway Revolts in Memphis and Nashville

Introduction

In the 1960s, freeway revolts emerged in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, challenging Interstate-40 expressway plans that would damage or destroy important inner-city spaces. In Memphis, park preservationist Anona Stoner linked an anti-freeway movement with an incipient urban environmentalism in an effort to protect the city’s magnificent Overton Park from Tennessee state road builders. Stoner became the driving force behind Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP), a small but effective organization that for years outfoxed Memphis municipal officials, state road engineers, two Tennessee governors, and a bevy of federal highway administrators, all of whom pushed for the expressway project through the park. The Overton Park expressway was never built, primarily because of Stoner’s relentless activism over more than a decade. Key assistance along the way came from John W. Vardaman, a brilliant young attorney working in public interest and environmental law, and from U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who wrote an important environmental decision in the Overton Park case before the Court in 1971. Stoner developed important connections with freeway fighters in other cities, activists who shared political and legal strategies in what was becoming a national movement against intrusive urban highways. She also built alliances with national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and Friends of the Earth—groups that helped make the Overton Park expressway battle a national environmental cause and that partially financed CPOP’s litigation efforts. Dismissed as a frail, white-haired lady in tennis shoes, Stoner was consistently underestimated by politicians, road engineers, and Washington transportation officials.

A few hundred miles away in Nashville, Flournoy Coles led a short-lived struggle to save the heart of the large North Nashville black community from the Tennessee road builders. A business and economics professor at Fisk University, Coles brought together several dozen black professionals to form the Nashville Interstate-40 Steering Committee. However, the Nashville freeway revolt began late in the day, leaving little time for effective action to short-circuit the highway bulldozers. As in Memphis, the Nashville freeway fighters moved toward litigation, claiming that the I-40 segment planned for North Nashville represented a civil rights violation against an entire community. Federal courts rejected this argument and the state road department moved quickly to build the expressway. Coles effectively represented his organization before state and federal officials, but he failed to tap into the large body of radical black students at Fisk and other Nashville black colleges who might have made a difference with marches and demonstrations.

Stoner and Coles pursued different paths, but they shared some common opponents in their efforts to protect neighborhoods and parks. These included municipal political regimes and allied downtown business elites (Stoner labeled them the “Downtowners”) invested in the idea that big, modern expressways might rescue declining central cities in an era of suburbanization. In both cities, local newspapers, radio, and television reflected the views of local power elites and rarely reported on expressway opposition. Tennessee Governor Frank G. Clement and state highway commissioner David M. Pack expressed deep commitments to Interstate-40 highway plans, despite numerous appeals from Stoner, Coles, and their colleagues. The state highway department, in particular, was a large bureaucratic organization run by highway engineers who considered their highest purpose to be pouring concrete for the motoring public. In addition, top federal highway and transportation officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations became personally involved in the expressway battles in Memphis and Nashville, both cities considered “trouble spots” on the interstate construction map. Federal highway administrators Rex M. Whitton, Lowell C. Bridwell, and Francis C. Turner, along with Department of Transportation secretaries Alan S. Boyd and John A. Volpe, became key players in the evolving freeway fights in the two Tennessee cities.

The Tennessee protest movements faced the same array of opponents but had different trajectories and different outcomes. In Memphis, organized anti-freeway resistance began in 1964 with the establishment of CPOP and persisted until 1981, when the state road department gave up on the Overton Park expressway. In Nashville, the freeway revolt began and ended in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the I-40 case. Stoner and Coles both came to rely on litigation to achieve their goals. In Nashville that strategy failed to protect black homes and businesses, whereas in Memphis litigation kept the state road builders out of Overton Park for almost two decades. Although timing was often a significant factor in the success or failure of a freeway revolt, persistent citizen activism over the long term made a real difference in the two Tennessee cities. The goal of this article, then, is to analyze in some detail the two freeway revolts and explain their divergent outcomes.

First, let us place the Tennessee freeway revolts in the larger national context. Early Interstate highway planning called for expressways that both encircled and traversed most of the nation’s central cities. A few cities such as Detroit and Chicago began funding and building expressways in the late Forties and early Fifties. Once the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized construction of the Interstate system, state highway departments generally moved first to build rural segments of the new road network. These segments of the system were relatively uncomplicated and built fairly quickly despite extensive mileage. By contrast, the shorter urban sections of the Interstate system involved numerous human and engineering complexities—difficult and costly right-of way-acquisition, relocation of utilities and rail lines, the destruction of residential neighborhoods and small businesses, and the displacement and relocation of hundreds of thousands of people. Interstate road corridors relentlessly plowed through cities’ historic districts, schools, churches, parks, waterfronts, and environmentally sensitive areas. Blending multilane elevated expressways with numerous bridges and on–off ramps into a well-established street grid became a monumental challenge to highway engineers. By the early 1960s, state highway departments began moving on these more difficult urban corridors of the Interstate system. That’s when the trouble began. ¹

Throughout the Sixties, in dozens of cities, outraged citizen activists confronted the invasive interstate expressways, eventually leading to a loosely connected, urban-based social movement we have come to know as the Freeway Revolt. Freeway opponents initially focused their attention on local and state officials and allied business groups, who often endorsed urban highway construction as essential for saving the central cities at a time when people and retail businesses were moving to the suburbs. Don’t get in the way of progress—that was the official mantra justifying the leveling of huge swaths of built-up urban space so that suburban commuters, consumers, and pleasure-seekers could speedily get downtown. It wasn’t long, however, before rising concerns about the bulldozer approach of the highway engineers filtered up into the halls of Congress. That body, in turn, responded with incremental legislation during the 1960s aimed at curbing the worst excesses of the state highway departments that built the Interstates. These laws mandated regional transportation planning for federally aided transportation projects; protected parks, historic districts, and sensitive environmental spaces; and required relocation housing for those displaced before any road construction began. Urban freeway fighters used various opposition strategies but ultimately came to rely on the courts in challenging Interstate route decisions, pointing especially to the federal mandates enacted between 1962 and 1970. ²

Citizens to Preserve Overton Park

These patterns prevailed in Memphis, where the Interstate-40 corridor through Overton Park had been on the state road department’s interstate map since 1955. (see figure 1) Designed by famous landscape architect and park-builder George Kessler in 1901, Overton Park was a magnificent Olmsted-like wilderness park of 342 acres, a largely natural oak and hickory forest located right in the center of the city, not far from the downtown business district. In 1955, a year before the federal interstate highway legislation, Harland Bartholomew and Associates, an engineering and planning firm with a major regional office in Memphis, prepared a planning report for the city’s expressway system that included the Overton Park segment. Consulting for the state in the late 1950s, the Bartholomew firm made additional engineering studies of numerous alternative routes for the central city expressway. Subsequently, the Tennessee state highway engineers incorporated the Overton Park expressway into its own Interstate planning, basing its decision on traffic desire lines and cost–benefit analysis—the standard statistical tools highway engineers had been using since the 1930s to determine where to locate new roads. The Memphis downtown civic elite embraced the Overton Park expressway as a key element in halting suburbanizing trends and in redeveloping the central city. Tennessee highway engineers appreciated the benefits of unobstructed parkland in running Interstate-40 on a straight westward track through town on its approach to a planned Mississippi River Interstate bridge to Arkansas, Little Rock, and beyond. The highway department incorporated standard economic and engineering factors into the decision-making process for locating the expressway in the park. However, the road engineers did not calculate the deeply held affection many Memphians had for Overton Park as a special place, a symbolic space that linked the past and the present. ³

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Figure 1.

U.S. Bureau of Public Roads plan for the general location of Interstate-40 through Memphis. Overton Park was on the Tennessee state highway engineers’ drawing boards from the beginning of the Interstate era.

As early as 1956, some Memphians began learning that Interstate-40 would bisect Overton Park. For instance, in July 1956 officials of the Harland Bartholomew firm held an informal meeting on the city’s expressway network at a local Methodist church. Those attending expressed concern about plans for Overton Park, as well as about the church itself, which sat in the expressway’s path just west of the park. Although hardly a freeway revolt at this point, the churchgoers formed a small, informal organization, the Committee for the Preservation of Overton Park. In April 1957, the Memphis City Commission held a public informational meeting on the planned Memphis interstate system. A few days earlier, a map of the proposed road network, including the Overton Park expressway, splashed across the pages of the Commercial Advertiser, Memphis’s leading newspaper. This visual evidence of the expressway’s destructive path spurred outrage and discontent; it also sparked the anti-freeway Committee into action. Committee leaders sent out a flyer urging attendance at the City Commission meeting, an appeal that turned out more than three hundred citizens. After listening impatiently as Harlan Bartholomew engineers and state highway officials launched into a technical presentation of the road-building plan, many began shouting out their opposition to a 450-foot interstate corridor slashing through the park. The Bartholomew engineers seemed evasive and repeatedly stated that little damage would be done to the park. They stressed the negative consequences of alternative routes that would cost more money, destroy established neighborhoods, and uproot thousands of homes and people. A few city officials in the late 1950s agreed with the highway protesters—Memphis Mayor Edmund Orgill and several members of the city’s Traffic Advisory Commission—but their voices were marginalized in a local debate dominated by highway engineers and downtown businessmen. ⁴

In 1957, expressway construction was still a decade away. The Overton Park controversy quieted down for several years, and the Committee became inactive. But there was more to come. Another public hearing in March 1961 renewed the deep divisions between expressway proponents and opponents. William S. Pollard of the Harland Bartholomew firm chaired this hearing on behalf of the Tennessee state highway department. Pollard generally ignored park preservationists and privileged speakers representing powerful local interest groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Association, and Future Memphis, Inc.—all supporters of the road through Overton Park. Irma O. Sternberg, author of a 1971 booklet on the Overton Park controversy, stated that protesters “believed from the first that the meeting had been rigged to wear down the opposition.” However, park defenders did get to make their case, as Sternberg reported. Frustrated by long presentations filled with “statistical jargon” on traffic patterns and cost differentials, one woman shouted out, “Will this [expressway] go through Overton Park?” An affirmative response from a state highway engineer produced a torrent of complaint and anger. Significantly, “mechanical failures” in recording this public hearing meant that no officially required transcript existed, a deficiency that became a matter of litigation later on. Despite growing opposition, state officials had already begun acquiring and clearing some right-of-way on the east and west approaches to Overton Park and took the position that the Overton route was settled business. Confronting an apparent fait accompli, opponents of the road became discouraged and disengaged from what seemed an increasingly fruitless fight. ⁵

In 1964, however, when a team of highway engineers arrived in Memphis for final design work on the Overton Park segment of the I-40 expressway, park preservationists got reenergized. A cohesive “nucleus of vigilant citizens” passionate about Overton Park reorganized their Committee under a new name, Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP). Marie Handy, wife of a local physician, served as president during 1964, then yielded to new leadership in 1965 that represented an expanded membership: Arlo I. Smith, a biology professor at Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College, and Anona Stoner, wife of a downtown business leader. As president of CPOP, Smith presented the public face of the organization, articulated position statements at hearings, wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, and, as a biologist, served as a link to the nation’s emerging environmental movement. Officially CPOP’s secretary, Stoner quickly became the motive force behind the organization, driving its preservationist agenda with relentless passion and an unbelievably aggressive letter-writing campaign. (See figure 2) An Oberlin graduate, Stoner had moved to Memphis in 1962 from Dayton, Ohio, where she had previously “tangled with highway planners in attempts to preserve park lands.” Her experience and energy were instrumental in shaping and implementing CPOP’s action agenda. ⁶

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Figure 2.

CPOP expressway protest mail and petitions pile up at the Tennessee Highway Department, 1965.

Smith and Stoner’s anti-freeway group did not pursue its objective—saving Overton Park—through protest marches and demonstrations, the typical oppositional tactics of the Sixties. The freeway revolt in Memphis was not a mass movement. Instead, they sought to engage politically at every level to protect the park, with litigation as a final alternative. They made little headway with city politicians on the Memphis City Commission and, after a governmental reorganization in early 1968, the Memphis City Council. Most local politicians committed to the promise of progress represented by urban expressways, perhaps a natural response given the nature of the contemporary national urban policy discourse about saving the central cities from traffic congestion, falling sales, and declining property values. Smith and Stoner faced similar obstinance at the state level, where political leaders respected the authority of local political regimes. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1964, Hardy, Smith, and Stoner met with Tennessee Governor Frank G. Clement and state highway commissioner David M. Pack. Pack agreed to consider two alternative routes that would avoid the park, but a month later, in November 1964, Pack confirmed his support for the Overton Park expressway. Governor Clement consistently supported the officially approved Interstate network in Tennessee, stubbornly resisting the outpouring of concern—expressed in petitions and letters—from environmentalists, preservationists, and other opponents of the Overton Park expressway. Blocked in the highway agency and at the executive level, CPOP leasers moved on to the state legislature, persuading a friendly Memphis area lawmaker to introduce a bill in the legislature protecting Overton Park. The measure sparked some initial enthusiasm among legislators, but the Memphis news media blasted the idea and scared off supporters. As Stoner noted, “Everyone became fearful of their political careers.” ⁷

Thus, very early on, CPOP’s leaders came to believe that stopping a federal highway in the late 1960s had become largely a national political exercise. Stoner and Smith recognized that federal legislation, executive decision making, and the bureaucratic policies and procedures of federal highway agencies often determined state and local highway outcomes. Consequently, CPOP embarked on a letter-writing campaign that persisted into the 1970s, focusing on key federal highway officials, congressmen, senators, and presidents. They became familiar with top bureaucrats and decision makers in the Bureau of Public Roads, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Department of Transportation, and they even traveled to Washington to make the case for Overton Park in person. They appealed state and federal highway decisions, requested new hearings or additional reviews, promoted alternative routes, and offered new corridor and design features. They negotiated on the width of the road corridor, the number of trees that might be saved, and the type of tunneling that might be permitted or acceptable. Some expressway opponents initially accepted the idea of a tunnel through the park, but eventually CPOP firmly advocated canceling the park route and shifting the expressway to the planned I-240 northern beltway. Stoner was no lawyer, but she had great analytical skills, tearing apart highway arguments and seizing on any error, inconsistency, or misstatement made by highway officials in meetings, speeches, or correspondence. Almost every letter from Stoner ended with questions demanding an answer, documented contradictions in official statements, or requested copies of reports, hearings, legislation, correspondence, and expressway route maps. In 1969, Federal Highway Administrator Frank Turner complained to a colleague that he had “exchanged several hundred pieces of correspondence” with Anona Stoner. Virtually all of the top federal highway leaders from 1964 into the 1970s—Rex Whitton, Frank Turner, Alan Boyd, Lowell Bridwell, John Volpe, James Braman—ended up coming to Memphis, often more than once, to inspect the Overton Park road corridor, confer with city and state officials, mediate issues with CPOP leaders, or sometimes to give a deposition in a legal matter related to the expressway. Memphis was one of the top “trouble spots” on the Interstate map, along with Nashville, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Federal highway officials sought to resolve these local disputes and get the Interstate System completed. CPOP’s tactics, however, frustrated Memphis politicians and state officials, upset the highway department’s construction timetables, and caused fits in Washington. ⁸

As an anti-freeway activist, Stoner acted locally but thought nationally. She knew that citizen groups in a few dozen other cities had also been fighting state and federal highway officials. Through extensive correspondence, she connected with freeway fighters in New Orleans, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They compared notes, considered ways of cooperating politically in the highway fight, and discussed various opposition strategies, including available legal options. From her counterpart in New Orleans, Martha G. Robinson, an uptown matriarch dedicated to defeating a planned riverfront expressway through the historic French Quarter, Stoner learned of their successful legal strategy based on federal historic preservation mandates. ⁹ From the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC) and the National Coalition on the Transportation Crisis (NCTC) in Washington, D.C., Stoner became aware of the legal battles that defeated multiple freeways that would have carved up the nation’s capital. ¹⁰ In 1968, when Robinson told her about Expressways Limited, an emerging national organization representing urban anti-freeway groups such as CPOP, Stoner dashed off letters about Overton Park and sought strategic advice and funding opportunities. ¹¹ Expressways Limited never got off the ground, but by the early 1970s, the Highway Action Coalition (HAC), headquartered in Washington, was serving as a national clearing house for freeway opponents everywhere. Stoner developed a long correspondence with HAC activists, who provided among other things detailed instructions on how to use litigation to stop unwanted road construction. ¹²

By the late 1960s, moreover, the national environmental movement was in full swing. Stoner found new allies for saving Overton Park in the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the Conservation Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Friends of the Earth, and other groups, some of which were already engaged in their own litigation based on the recently passed National Environmental Policy Act (1969). Importantly, some of these organizations contributed financially to CPOP’s subsequent litigation against the Overton Park Expressway; the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society joined CPOP’s lawsuit. ¹³ In early 1971, Arlo Smith brought the litigious Ralph Nader to Southwestern at Memphis, where he gave a two-hour speech on environmental issues and how they affected Memphis. ¹⁴ Stoner’s missives penetrated deep into the federal bureaucracy, where she found sympathetic supporters in the Interior Department’s Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. ¹⁵ Connecting with environmental and anti-freeway activists in other cities and in the federal government gave Stoner and Smith a better perspective on the levers of power, such as legal action, that might work in CPOP’s favor. In this, Stoner was pursuing the insight offered by Martha Robinson of New Orleans, who wrote in June 1968, “we know that it will take a great deal of political power to contend with the Expressway lobby and its minions in the Congress.” ¹⁶ By the late 1960s, as well, national media had begun writing about the troublesome consequences of ramming huge expressways through central city areas, raising environmental consciousness around the nation and bringing new supporters to CPOP. ¹⁷ (See figure 3)

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Figure 3.

Logo used by Memphis anti-freeway group, Citizens to Preserve Overton Park.

By December 1969, however, CPOP’s leaders had exhausted their administrative appeals and other delaying tactics. By that time, as well, DOT secretary John Volpe had officially approved final design modifications for I-40 through Overton Park, leaving litigation as a last resort. For several years, Anona Stoner had been seeking an attorney to take on their case. She complained to correspondents that no Memphis attorney seemed willing to jeopardize a local legal career by going up against powerful local and state interests. ¹⁸ Once again, however, Stoner’s new connections with anti-freeway activists around the country provided a solution. Stoner contacted Gerald Norton, the Washington, D.C., attorney who successfully represented opponents of an Interstate-66 bridge across the Potomac River from Virginia and through a park on the District side—the never-built Three Sisters Bridge—hoping that he would take their case. Norton was busy with other work, but he recommended John W. Vardaman, a young Harvard law graduate working at the D.C. law firm of Williams, Connolly, and Califano. Vardaman had been part of the legal team that successfully argued the Three Sisters Bridge case, which ended planned construction. The young attorney jumped at the chance to work in the emerging area of public interest and environmental law. In July 1970, Vardaman filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington (subsequently shifted to the U.S. District Court in Memphis) requesting an injunction to halt Overton Park expressway construction. By that time, Vardaman found a young Memphis attorney, Charles Newman, to work with him on Memphis court proceedings. Over the next few years, Stoner devoted a considerable amount of time to raising funds to pay legal expenses. During this period, Vardaman also worked on similar controversial highway cases in New Orleans and San Antonio. ¹⁹

After setbacks in 1970 for the plaintiffs in the federal district court in Memphis, as well as in the Sixth District Court of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Overton Park case on appeal. ²⁰ The key issues in the case revolved around congressional intent of section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act of 1966—a mandate that federal highways could be built through public parkland only if “no feasible and prudent alternative” route could be found, and that such a highway included “all possible planning to minimize harm to the park.” The operative vocabulary here involved the words “feasible and prudent.” In a unanimous decision, written by Judge Thurgood Marshall and delivered on March 2, 1971, the Supreme Court found that DOT Secretary Volpe had erred in failing to issue a formal finding that there were no feasible or prudent alternatives to the Overton Park expressway. There were other irregularities, as well, especially since no administrative record existed on which Volpe could have based his decision to approve funding for the Overton route. Marshall’s decision altered the interpretation of Section 4(f) in powerful ways by stating that “the very existence of the statute indicates that parkland was to be given paramount importance.” Parklands, Marshall continued, “were not to be lost unless there were truly unusual factors present in a particular case or the cost of community disruption resulting from alternative routes reached extraordinary magnitude.” The Overton Park decision essentially took public parklands off the road builders’ interstate maps. ²¹

Marshall’s decision did not bring the Memphis case to a close, however. The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the U.S. Sixth District Court of Appeals, which returned the case to Secretary Volpe to review the record on the “feasible and prudent” alternatives, as mandated in section 4(f) of the DOT Act of 1966. Not surprisingly, after additional hearings in Memphis, in January 1973, Volpe reversed course, asserting now that there were possible alternative routes and, furthermore, that new congressional environmental policy legislation and Federal Highway Administration noise standards had not been met for the Overton Park route. Two years later, now U.S. ambassador to Italy, Volpe confessed to CPOP activist Sara Hines: “As I look back on my years as Secretary of Transportation, I honestly believe that our decision concerning the park was one of our best decisions.” ²²

Despite the Supreme Court’s vigorous defense of public parkland and Volpe’s shutdown decision in 1973, the legal dispute over Overton Park dragged on for another decade. Throughout the 1970s, Tennessee road officials challenged earlier decisions by the DOT and the courts. They continued to seek DOT approvals for various alternative expressway plans, including several tunnel designs, but all of them cut through Overton Park along the same route the state had been promoting since 1955. Vardaman successfully parried every move of the Tennessee DOT. Tennessee officials considered building the road entirely with state money, but the costs seemed prohibitive. Only in 1981 did the Tennessee DOT “throw in the towel,” and request that planned expressway funding—about $300 million—be transferred to other transportation needs in Memphis. Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe became a landmark case in environmental and administrative law, setting important precedents still applied decades later. CPOP had its victory, a testament to the dogged determination of activist citizens and the work a brilliant and persistent young attorney committed to public interest law. Today, the northern leg of the I-240 beltway serves as the east–west expressway in Memphis, the alternate route CPOP and its predecessor organization consistently advocated as early as 1961. Overton Park remains a beautiful and vital recreational resource for the Memphis area. ²³

Nashville I-40 Steering Committee

In Memphis, the freeway revolt emphasized the environmental costs of an expressway through Overton Park. In Nashville, the freeway revolt was all about the racial impact of road building. Tennessee state highway engineers with a racial agenda early on decided to build I-40 through the heart of the North Nashville black community, despite the devastating physical and social consequences. Racial agendas also emerged in Memphis, where some sections of the city’s expressway system leveled black neighborhoods. Racial undercurrents, in fact, prevailed in both cities in the 1950s, when the urban interstates were planned, and in the 1960s, when they were built. On April 4, 1968, a crucial Memphis city council vote supporting the Overton Park expressway took place, about an hour before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in the city. Some racial violence occurred in both cities following the death of Dr. King, as it did in dozens of cities large and small. Nashville was a hotbed of civil rights organizing, sit-ins, and student demonstrations throughout the sixties, some leading to violent confrontations with police. Several nights of police clashes with black college students erupted in April 1967 after black power advocate Stokely Carmichael made a radical speech at Vanderbilt University. Both cities were racially segregated and divided residentially, like the South generally, and race relations became more troublesome by the end of the sixties. In both cities, many public policy decisions had racial implications and racial intentions—public schooling, for instance, or urban renewal, or public housing location, or interstate highway routing. ²⁴

Anticipating congressional action on a new federal highway program, in 1955 the Tennessee state road department contracted with the New York consulting engineering firm of Clarke and Rapuano to update an earlier highway plan of 1946 and provide a preliminary corridor study for Nashville’s future expressway system. Like many cities, Nashville planned an inner loop or beltway that connected with three interstates routes heading off in various directions. (See Figure 4) For the I-40 route off the western side of the inner loop (the so-called Memphis route), Clarke and Rapuano recommended a corridor along Charlotte Street that paralleled a rail line and traversed rail yards, obsolete and blighted housing, and much undeveloped land. Acquisition costs along this corridor were termed moderate. The planners’ recommended highway route did not destroy any black housing, although it would have divided black communities to the north from white areas to the south of the highway line. With its focus on traffic flows and acquisition costs, the Clarke and Rapuano report was in line with standard professional engineering practice at the time. ²⁵

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Figure 4.

Interstate plans for Nashville were complicated, as reflected in this 1955 image from the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads. In the late 1950s, the state highway department shifted the corridor to Memphis (on the left) so that it passed through the center of the North Nashville African American community.

In June 1955, state highway officials, along with Nashville city and county planners, met with Clarke and Rapuano representatives to discuss the report. Most of the corridor plan was acceptable, but according to a memorandum summarizing the meeting, the route to Memphis was found wanting. Highway officials argued it was too close to rail lines, had insufficient access points, and passed through some difficult topography. The several parties held three days of meetings a few weeks later, with results summarized in a second memorandum. Substantive detail spelled out changes for some I-40 segments, but for the corridor to Memphis the memo stated simply and without elaboration: “The route proposed by the State Highway department was agreed upon.” ²⁶

The road department’s plan, as the public learned almost a decade later, shifted the I-40 corridor a mile or so to the north, where it carved through the center of the large North Nashville black community. (see Figure 5) The 2.5-mile expressway cut directly through the main black business district on Jefferson Street with its 128 black-owned business. Eventually, the I-40 expressway demolished more than 620 black homes, twenty-seven apartment houses, and six black churches. It dead-ended fifty local streets, disrupted traffic flow, and brought noise and air pollution to the community. It separated children from their playgrounds and schools, parishioners from their churches, and businesses from their customers. Three key black community institutions—Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A. & I. University (later Tennessee State University)—were walled off from each other and from the larger black community by the six-lane expressway and its access roads. Yale Rabin, a city planner who worked as a consultant for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued that the Tennessee State Highway Department purposefully shifted the I-40 corridor to North Nashville. As Rabin wrote, the state’s new road corridor “literally goes out of its way to devastate the Black business community, uproot Black homes and churches, and restrict the growth, operation, and interaction of three major Black institutions of higher learning.” ²⁷

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Figure 5.

Various alternative routes for Interstate-40 heading west to Memphis from downtown Nashville. The Jefferson Street location through North Nashville was chosen by the Tennessee State Highway Department as early as 1955.

What prompted state road engineers to change in the I-40 plan of the route to Memphis? According to Rabin, Clarke and Rapuano’s original road plan was highly professional and fully documented. As Rabin wrote, “The submittal of the proposed route was accompanied by a comprehensive report containing supporting data including not only engineering and traffic criteria, but noting in addition that careful consideration had been given to such factors as the impact of the proposed route on neighborhood patterns and structures, and the economy of the areas through which the road would pass.” By contrast, no detailed impact, traffic, or cost–benefit studies of the kind highway engineers routinely made of alternate routes were conducted during the three-week period in 1955 when the expressway was officially shifted to North Nashville. Interviewed on this subject in 1970 by University of Tennessee graduate student Hubert James Ford, Clarke and Rapuano engineer Alexander Koltowich confirmed that no additional route studies had been made “since the routing through the black community was the only obviously feasible alternative.” ²⁸

There’s that word again—feasible. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the new I-40 route to Memphis was racially determined, rather than the result of careful, objective, engineering studies of various alternatives. In his 1983 article, “The Kink in Nashville’s Interstate 40,” urban studies scholar John E. Seley pointed out that African Americans in Nashville at the time “noted that the isolation of area public schools created by the highway would make school desegregation very difficult,” which suggested a specific contemporary motivation on the part of the highway engineers and city leaders. Rabin’s report “North Nashville and I-40,” noted that a large, new, and white-owned shopping center development “on the northern fringe of the North Nashville community would reap the benefits of the demise of Jefferson Street.” The racial outcome of the I-40 route through North Nashville reflected the interests of powerful white leaders and business groups. In December 1969, in a long Saturday Evening Post article on Nashville’s I-40 controversy, journalist Richard J. Whalen concluded that “the evidence of a racial double standard in the planning is persuasive.” ²⁹

None of those consequences were yet known or even imagined in black Nashville. The state road department kept information about the North Nashville route under wraps until 1957. A news article in April 1957 provided misleading information about the I-40 route, and an accompanying map was deceivingly incomplete. The required public hearing on the expressway route, held in May 1957, was problematic. Required notices of the hearing were posted (on the “wanted” bulletin board) in only a few post offices in white neighborhoods, but not in local newspapers. The posted information gave an erroneous date for the meeting. At the hearing, road officials kept the discussion brief, generalized, and evasive. The required transcript of the meeting was incomplete, allegedly due to recorder malfunction (apparently a common occurrence in Tennessee road department hearings). Few citizens attended the hearing, none of them black. Only in 1965 when state property appraisers began acquiring land in the North Nashville expressway corridor did black citizens begin to understand that their community had been targeted by the state highway department. ³⁰

The long delay of almost a decade before any signs of road construction lulled North Nashville residents into inaction. In the years after the public hearing, city and state officials were deceptive, uncommunicative, and even untruthful regarding the I-40 route. Whenever African Americans inquired about the future expressway, they were told that the announced plans were only “preliminary,” or “not finalized,” or “subject to change.” Two black members of the Nashville metro council were frequently rebuffed when seeking specific plans for the I-40 roadway. Seley cited a sense of powerlessness in the black community, a “legacy” of the Jim Crow South and the sour memory of an urban renewal program of the mid-1950s that uprooted an older inner-city black community. Many of the black businesses dislocated at that time relocated to North Nashville and now faced displacement once again. Frequent statements by white leaders that expressways meant progress for the city as a whole led many in North Nashville to accept the inevitable. But mostly the lack of any specific route information until the state began buying up property militated against any early or effective community protest organization. ³¹

Big ideas about urban redevelopment in Nashville connected highway routing with urban renewal, a common pattern in the makeover of the postwar American city. The North Nashville expressway had its origins in urban renewal politics, although few blacks recognized this linkage at the time. According to a 1971 study of political participation in Nashville by University of Tennessee political scientist Charles A. Zuzak and colleagues, state highway officials and Clarke and Rapuano planners agreed on the 1955 North Nashville route of I-40 because it linked the expressway with an anticipated urban renewal plan for the entire community. Clarke and Rapuano was already involved in Nashville’s urban renewal plans. By 1955, highway planners deemed the original I-40 route along Charlotte Street unsatisfactory because it ran too close to Vanderbilt University, a nearby upper-class white community, and a park and hospital, both segregated. North Nashville was the more likely urban renewal neighborhood because of its lower land-acquisition costs, aging housing stock, and racial characteristics. ³²

However, these urban renewal plans never worked out because of squabbles between city and state over funding. The federal government paid 90 percent of construction and related costs for the interstates, while the state picked up the remainder. The federal government paid for two-thirds of urban renewal funding, while cities absorbed the rest. The state highway department planned the I-40 road corridor in such a way that it would be minimally responsible for relocation or redevelopment costs, placing a heavier burden on the city. Complicating matters, the City of Nashville consolidated with Davidson County in 1962, creating the nation’s first true metropolitan government. Years of delay and confusion followed, as various agencies and programs merged their functions and personnel. Urban renewal never got back into the discussion. By the late Sixties, as well, urban renewal had fallen out of favor among urban policy makers nationally, and it was often criticized as “Negro removal.” New public housing programs, which often accompanied urban renewal, had similarly disappeared from the urban policy toolbox. Thus, Nashville’s new metro government did not pursue urban renewal or public housing during the crucial mid-1960s—years when the North Nashville expressway was getting underway. In 1967, Nashville’s metro government did, however, begin the process of applying for federal redevelopment funding under the new Model Cities program, selecting North Nashville as the targeted area. But African Americas in North Nashville could not understand why one federal agency would be building up the community while another would be tearing it down. ³³

Nashville’s freeway revolt came late and didn't last long. The I-40 Steering Committee, North Nashville’s first cohesive effort to fight the planned expressway, formally organized in October 1967. Headed by Dr. Flournoy A. Coles, an economics professor at Fisk University, the new anti-freeway organization consisted of about thirty Fisk and Meharry Medical School faculty members and a few North Nashville black professionals. As the state began acquiring property in the area, Coles and a few others learned about the alternative route that had been proposed and rejected. Another Steering Committee member, Dr. Edwin Mitchell, a physician at Meharry, found out about the sequence of state road plans through his position as head of Nashville’s Metropolitan Human Relations Commission (which, parenthetically, seemed to have little influence over onrushing events in North Nashville). Both Coles and Mitchell had been involved in the early stages of Nashville’s Model Cities program, now threatened by the I-40 expressway. ³⁴

The black professionals who formed the I-40 Steering Committee did not share the radical politics of black power advocates of the late 1960s. Coles and Mitchell believed that white racism dictated the location of the expressway, but they never considered mobilizing marches, demonstrations, or other confrontational social action to draw attention to the planned expressway’s enormous social and economic costs to the black community. Instead, they condemned the racial violence that rocked Nashville in April 1967 after Stokely Carmichael’s speech at Vanderbilt. They took a more conciliatory approach to Interstate plans, hoping as black professionals to rationally discuss and negotiate issues with key white decision makers. However, as journalist Richard J. Whalen noted, “to many white men [in Nashville] it seems the height of extremism for Negroes to demand a voice in the fate of their community.” Coles and Mitchell met with Nashville Mayor Beverly Briley, who took a hands-off position on the expressway. Briley reportedly stated, “When I talked to the state highway boys, I wasn’t so sure the road should go where they said. But I got the idea that they weren’t going to voluntarily change this—they were too committed. And I have no authority to tell them what to do.” Coles and his colleagues also met with state highway officials and sent telegrams to Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington and key federal highway officials. These efforts emphasized the damaging impact of the interstate and urged a ninety-day delay in initiating highway construction, thus providing time for a new study of alternatives. Coles traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with officials in the Federal Highway Administration and the Bureau of Public Roads. When the Fisk-Meharry group got stonewalled at every level, they formally established the I-40 Steering Committee. ³⁵

Nashville’s freeway revolt organization sought immediately to identify a new alternative expressway route. They contracted with University of Pennsylvania city planner Yale Rabin, who within one month detailed a more distant expressway route that paralleled the Cumberland River and avoided black neighborhoods entirely. Rabin's proposal eliminated the destructive consequences of the North Nashville expressway, but the state road department never seriously considered the plan. DOT secretary Alan S. Boyd failed to respond to a last-minute appeal. Anticipating this result, the I-40 Steering Committee hired Avon N. Williams, a local civil rights attorney affiliated with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and immediately filed suit in U.S. District Court in Nashville requesting an injunction to temporarily stop the road builders. ³⁶

The I-40 Steering Committee’s case rested on two major issues. First, they argued that the 1957 public hearing on I-40 expressway plans did not meet legal requirements, since public notification was inadequate, the date of the hearing was erroneous, and the transcript of the tape-recorded hearing was incomplete. In addition, no engineering or economic impact studies had been completed in 1955 when the road department shifted the I-40 route to North Nashville. Thus, black residents were never informed about the hearing or the planned route, never had an opportunity to speak on the record to challenge state plans or studies or defend their neighborhood. Second, the Steering Committee lawsuit maintained that the North Nashville expressway was racially discriminatory: “The routing of said link of the highway through the North Nashville ghetto in its present location constitutes discrimination on the grounds of race, color, and socioeconomic condition of the plaintiffs.” During the three-day judicial hearing, Rabin testified as an expert witness, challenging the credibility of the state’s highway planning record. Many black residents poured out several hundred pages of testimony on the social and economic consequences they faced when their homes, businesses, schools, churches, and jobs disappeared. Attorney Williams grilled state highway officials, forcing them to admit that they made no studies of the economic or social impact of the North Nashville route. Nevertheless, those officials maintained that “race had nothing to do with it.” ³⁷

Expressway opponents thought they had a strong case, but Judge Frank Gray Jr. denied the request for an injunction. He determined that the public hearing, although poorly run, met basic federal requirements. The plaintiffs had demonstrated the serious economic impact of the road, the judge agreed, but they had not proven “a deliberate purpose to discriminate against the residents of North Nashville on the basis of race or socioeconomic condition.” Gray summarized by stating that “most of the evidence presented by the plaintiffs goes to the wisdom and not to the legality of the highway department’s decision.” In short, the highway through the ghetto was a bad idea, but the road engineers had the authority to do whatever they wanted, even if they failed to comply in detail with their own rules and regulations. Ford, author of a detailed study of the Nashville expressway story, concluded that the court overvalued the professional expertise of the state road engineers, even though they never produced any scientific or engineering studies of the North Nashville route, or even remembered that there had been an alternate route. For Ford, it seemed inexplicable that the court “was sold on the technical engineering aspect of highway location and closed its mind to the fact that location can possibly be highly intuitive and political.” The road engineers’ collective amnesia on the sudden route alteration in 1955 annoyed Rabin, who dismissively wrote after the hearing that “the court apparently found this astonishing testimony quite believable.” The politics of expertise persisted in Nashville, even though it had been discredited in highway disputes in other cities.” ³⁸

Within a week, the I-40 Steering Committee, now assisted by famed NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Jack Greenberg, filed an appeal in the Sixth District Court of Appeals. In this appeal, the plaintiffs refined their argument, but maintained the two basic complaints about the improper hearing and the racial discriminatory intent of the Tennessee road engineers. They raised several issues regarding the responsibilities of highway officials to comply with statutes and administrative requirements, failure to maintain public records, failure to consider alternative routes, and failure to consider the economic impact of the expressway. The I-40 Steering Committee appeal was denied by a three-judge panel on December 18, 1967, and ten days later the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The Steering Committee had exhausted its last opportunity to save North Nashville from the highwaymen. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision, the Tennessee road department unleashed its bulldozers. ³⁹

The Nashville case created considerable anguish within the federal highway bureaucracy. DOT secretary Alan S. Boyd and his Federal Highway Administrator, Lowell K. Bridwell, came to their positions with the creation of the DOT in April 1967. They wanted to get the Interstate system completed, but they also sought to moderate the inflexible methods of the road engineers who ran the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads and the state highway departments. In one speech in 1967, Boyd argued that the freeway revolts were valuable because they got people more involved in their own communities. He warned road engineers that they had to curb their appetite for pouring concrete and damaging urban neighborhoods. Similarly, Bridwell sought to resolve controversial urban expressway routes where possible through route modifications and compromise, often traveling to “trouble spots” to meet with contenting parties. Nashville was one of those trouble spots, where black communities, “because of experience with other public programs, seem particularly sensitive to being displaced.” During the 1960s, Congress was telling the road builders to change their ways, and especially to keep federal highways away from parks, historic districts, minority communities, and environmentally sensitive areas. ⁴⁰

Why, then, did Boyd and Bridwell sign off on the damaging North Nashville route? In many cities, state highway departments had moved quickly to acquire and clear their urban interstate corridors before the DOT could put on the brakes or call for a review. Both Boyd and Bridwell lamented the fact that the Nashville right-of-way had been purchased and the land cleared before they took office in April 1967. As Bridwell noted in a January 1969 memorandum to BPR director Francis C. Turner, I-40’s damage to North Nashville was the consequence “of decisions in the 1950s not to accept locations through other developed areas in Nashville.” Accepting the reality on the ground, they determined that it was too late to reverse course, but also that North Nashville required some mitigation to help keep the community alive. In early 1968, before giving final approvals on the Nashville expressway, Bridwell met several times with I-40 Steering Committee members, Nashville mayor Briley, and state highway officials to discuss modifications for the North Nashville segment. As a result, Bridwell required the road department to add automobile and pedestrian underpasses and overpasses at specific locations. Bridwell also stipulated modifications, paid for from federal funds, that added platforms or decks over the depressed expressway at several points, so that local businesses might have access to “air-space utilization” and help connect people and businesses on either side of the roadway. Finally, Bridwell stressed that the DOT would coordinate with HUD to direct Model Cities funding to areas affected by the expressway. ⁴¹

However, few of the Model Cities programs aimed at North Nashville worked or were ever implemented. Mayor Briley resisted full community participation, his Model Cities director preferred delay to action, and blacks remained deeply divided about what to do. Questions persisted about who would pay and how much. Richard W. Creswell, a member of the I-40 Steering Committee and coauthor of a detailed 1972 article on Nashville’s Model Cities program, explained its failure: “Programs without clearly defined policies seem inevitably to result in massive bureaucratic staffing, coordination, reporting, duplication, and evaluation, but only incidentally—perhaps accidentally—in tangible results.” By that time, Boyd and Bridwell were gone, replaced in 1969 by new transportation appointees in the Nixon administration with little interest in reviving the I-40 expressway controversy. ⁴²

As mitigating features of the North Nashville expressway remained mostly unimplemented, Boyd and Bridwell were seemingly feeling guilty about the entire situation. Interviewed toward the end of his term in office by Richard J. Whelan, author of a key article on the freeway revolt, Bridwell let his guard down. As Whelan wrote, Bridwell was “privately critical of the ‘atrocious’ planning behind the [Nashville] expressway, but too much time and money had been committed for him to withhold final approval. ‘Now it's just a patch job,’ Bridwell admits." The final word belonged to DOT secretary Boyd. In an April 1968 letter to Flournoy Coles, Boyd seemed contrite and apologetic. “In retrospect,” Boyd wrote, “it may well have been more desirable to locate the highway on a different line.” ⁴³

Analysis and Conclusion

In the postwar era, urban political leaders and city planners agreed on the need for remaking downtown America through urban renewal and express highways. State highway engineers eagerly promoted urban road building, especially after the federal government kicked in 90 percent of the cost with the 1956 law creating the Interstate Highway System. Despite the rising toll of housing demolitions and community disruption from urban highway building, politicians, planners, and road engineers remained committed to the modernizing growth agenda well into the 1960s. By that time, citizen opposition and Congressional legislation began to rein in the expressway-building regime. Change did not happen all at once, however. The situation varied from city to city and state to state, depending on political circumstances, bureaucratic policy shifts, the strength of citizen opposition, and judicial decision-making.

Freeway revolts in Memphis and Nashville demonstrated how the interplay of these forces shaped outcomes. The two cases are similar in many ways. Interstates were slated to bisect and encircle each city. Powerful civic elites in both cities strongly supported downtown expressways to counter the decline of central business districts. The same set of state road engineers took on the task of getting the roads built despite any obstacle, whether topographical or human. Overton Park or North Nashville—it did not matter to the road engineers. Their job was to build highways and smooth and speed the way for truckers and the American motorist. They routinely brushed off or ignored people complaining about the application of their professional expertise. Top level federal highway bureaucrats interjected themselves into both freeway controversies, hoping to negotiate or mediate an outcome that would get the road built. Arrogance and inflexibility seemed ubiquitous among state road engineers at the time, while federal highway officials began moving toward more moderate ways of getting the job done. Freeway fighters in both cities had to confront the power, authority, and supposed professional expertise of the highway establishment and urban political elites.

But there were striking differences between the two freeway revolts, and these differences explain the divergent outcomes. Timing had a lot to do with success or failure in the business of fighting the road engineers. The state’s expressway plans for the two cities, as well as the first public hearings, were developed at the same time—the mid-1950s. Citizen opposition began early in Memphis with a large turnout at the public hearing in 1957, and an episodic activism persisted over time, even before creation of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park. In Nashville, the freeway revolt came much later, partially because the state road department deceptively kept route details from the community, but partially because no community leaders took charge the way CPOP’s Marie Handy and then Anona Stoner did in Memphis until it was too late. Even the Sixth District Appeals Court judges scolded the Nashville-I-40 Steering Committee, stating “It also is to be regretted that appellants waited so late to begin their efforts to correct the grave consequences which will result from the construction of this highway.” ⁴⁴ By contrast, CPOP relentlessly opposed the expressway through Overton Park; Stoner especially maintained an astounding correspondence over almost two decades. This almost obsessive persistence paid off for Memphis. The thin paper trail left behind by Nashville’s Steering Committee pales by comparison to the 89 boxes of CPOP papers at the Memphis Public Library.

Timing made a difference in another important way, as well. The Nashville freeway revolt was short and basically over by December 1967. Ongoing discussions with DOT and with city officials over Model Cities and highway mitigation efforts continued through 1968, but it was clear that the expressway would be built. In Memphis, however, road opponents had managed to delay and appeal and postpone and get new reviews and alternative route studies from 1964 to 1969. By doing so, they were able to take advantage of new federal legislation between 1966 and 1970 that required two public hearings, that protected parks and historic districts and that privileged environmentally sensitive areas. The I-40 Steering Committee’s decision to make racial discrimination a foundation of its case against the expressway might have had greater success a few years later, but there were no legal prohibitions against routing highways through residential neighborhoods, black or white. CPOP was able to get expert legal representation from attorneys with experience in other highway cases. Justice Thurgood Marshall not only found in their favor but he also expanded the legal interpretation of Section 4(f) of the DOT Act so as to require a full administrative record to justify DOT approvals of controversial expressways. Administrative procedures within the DOT were also undergoing change. By 1969, DOT lawyers were raising red flags over missing or incomplete public hearing transcripts, which happened both in Memphis and Nashville. By failing to comply with these and other DOT policies and procedures, according to DOT attorney James A. Washington Jr., the agency invited litigation. ⁴⁵ These administrative shifts came too late to have any impact on the Nashville case.

CPOP benefited from its wide-ranging connections with freeway fighters in other cities, whereas Nashville’s I-40 Steering Committee operated in isolation. Stoner and her colleagues took full advantage of what they learned from counterparts in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They recognized that their goal—saving Overton Park—was part of a larger movement to protect the American environment, and they linked their cause with powerful national organizations such as the Sierra Club. By contrast, the I-40 Steering Committee never seemed to realize that an expressway through a black community was not unique to Nashville, and that African Americans in other cities had been dealing with this issue with some success elsewhere. The Nashville road opponents had comparatively little time to develop a full arsenal of anti-freeway weapons. However, a reliance on moderation and a reluctance to work with militant black groups in the city undermined the potential power of the Nashville freeway revolt. They linked their cause to civil rights and a NAACP legal defense strategy at a time when the black power movement had become dominant in American cities. These distinctions help to explain divergent outcomes in Memphis and Nashville. In the final analysis, the organization, commitment, ingenuity, energy, and action of people in revolt against freeways was always key to a favorable outcome.