Rondo, cut in half by Interstate 94

Rondo Avenue ran east-west through St. Paul between Rice Street and Lexington Avenue, and the neighbourhood around it held the city's Black middle class: homeowners, porters and postal workers, two newspapers, the Hallie Q. Brown community centre, churches, grocers and clubs. Housing discrimination elsewhere in St. Paul is part of why it was so concentrated there, and the density is what made it a community.

When Interstate 94 was planned in the 1950s, engineers had a northern alternative along an existing railway corridor, which would have displaced far fewer people. The state chose the Rondo route. The Rondo-St. Anthony Improvement Association, started in 1956 by Timothy Howard and the Reverend Floyd Massey Jr., fought it, and won only a concession on design: the road would run in a trench rather than on an embankment.

Construction between 1956 and 1968 took, by commonly cited estimates, around 700 homes and 300 businesses. One in every eight Black residents of St. Paul lost a home to the road. Families who had built equity over decades were paid condemnation prices and sent into a market that would not sell or lend to them freely. The neighbourhood that remains on either side of the trench has spent sixty years organising around what was taken, and Minnesota's transportation department has since acknowledged the route as a racial injustice.