The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

The court-ordered remedy was construction of new housing in the city only
for those families who had been displaced, who could still be found, and
who had indicated to interviewers that they would be willing to return to
Hamtramck. Because the litigation had dragged on, their number was a small
share of those who had suffered harm, most of whom had no choice but to
move into the Detroit ghetto.
Federal interstate highways buttressed segregation in cities across the
country. In 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed I-95 to do what
Miami’s unconstitutional zoning ordinance had intended but failed to
accomplish two decades earlier: clear African Americans from an area
adjacent to downtown. An alternative route utilizing an abandoned railway
right of way was rejected, although it would have resulted in little population
removal. When the highway was eventually completed in the mid-1960s, it
had reduced a community of 40,000 African Americans to 8,000.
In Camden, New Jersey, an interstate highway destroyed some 3,000 lowincome
housing units from 1963 to 1967. A report by the New Jersey State
Attorney General’s office concluded: “It is obvious from a glance at the . . .
transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto
Rican ghetto areas by . . . building highways that benefit white suburbanites,
facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back.”