Hayti, taken for the Durham Freeway
Redevelopment and freeway construction, late 1950s to 1970sHayti, along Fayetteville Street south of downtown, Durham County, NC
Urban renewal and the Durham Freeway destroyed the commercial heart of Hayti, one of the most successful Black business districts in the South, along with thousands of homes.
Hayti grew up south of the railway tracks in Durham after the Civil War and became one of the most substantial Black communities in the country. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance - for decades the largest Black-owned business in America - and Mechanics and Farmers Bank were founded in Durham, and Fayetteville Street carried the groceries, pharmacies, theatres, tailors and funeral homes that let the neighbourhood circulate its own money.
Between the late 1950s and the 1970s the Hayti Redevelopment Project and the construction of the North Carolina 147 Durham Freeway cut through it. Thousands of households and several hundred businesses were cleared. Residents had been promised that new housing and commercial space would follow; most of the land stayed vacant for years, and much of the business district never came back, because a condemnation payment does not replace a storefront with sixty years of customers attached.
The freeway did what freeways did in dozens of Southern cities: it separated a Black neighbourhood from the downtown it had traded with, and it was built through the one part of town whose residents had the least political power to refuse it. St. Joseph's AME Church, now the Hayti Heritage Center, is among the few landmarks left standing.
Published estimates of the clearance range into the thousands of households and several hundred businesses.
Sources
- Black Wall Street, Durham, North CarolinaNCpedia, State Library of North Carolinancpedia.org
- Durham's Hayti and Black Wall StreetDigital Durham, Duke Universitydigitaldurham.duke.eduDigitised records, maps and photographs of the neighbourhood before clearance.