Comeback Town is an opinion column exploring all things Birmingham. It is coordinated by David Sher. Today’s column is based on the podcast, Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast. Episode 552: Under a Highway in Birmingham, Alabama.
If you look at an aerial photograph of downtown Birmingham, you’ll notice something peculiar: Interstate 59 and Interstate 20 make a sharp, inexplicable bend as they pass through the city center. That bend tells a story—one of the darkest chapters in American urban planning.
The Ugly History
When highway planners designed Birmingham’s interstate system in the 1950s and 60s, they didn’t choose that route by accident. They deliberately carved the highway through a thriving Black neighborhood—specifically targeting the area where Birmingham’s civil rights leaders lived. The goal was twofold: destroy a vibrant community and, planners hoped, interfere with the civil rights movement itself.
It’s a pattern repeated across America, where highways became weapons of urban renewal, systematically dismantling Black neighborhoods under the guise of progress. Birmingham’s bend in the road is physical evidence of that intentional destruction, a scar that remains visible decades later.
When the Highway Needed Rebuilding
Fast forward to 2016. The highway’s useful life had expired, and the Alabama Department of Transportation needed to reconstruct it. Controversy was inevitable, though ALDOT apparently didn’t see it coming. Community members organized to stop the project entirely, demanding the highway be buried and capped—an idea ALDOT quickly dismissed as too expensive…