Tremé and the Claiborne Expressway

The city that free people of color built

Claude Tremé, a free man of color and a fur trader, purchased a tract of land on the upriver side of the Vieux Carré from Claude Gurlie and Joseph Guillot in 1810.¹ He subdivided the land and sold lots to buyers who were, like himself, members of New Orleans’ remarkable free Black community. The city acquired the remaining portion of the tract in 1812 to establish what would become Faubourg Tremé, the city’s sixth faubourg.² The neighborhood that grew up on those lots became the first self-organized, continuously inhabited African-American urban community in the United States.

The distinction is not ceremonial. Other American cities had antebellum Black neighborhoods, but most were cleared under Reconstruction-era ordinances or the federal urban-renewal programs of the mid-twentieth century. Tremé survived both. The survival owes most to the structure of Louisiana’s colonial legal order and to the organizing capacity of the free people of color who used it.

Under the French Code Noir, enslaved people in Louisiana could earn wages on Sundays and holidays and purchase their own freedom. The Spanish government, which assumed colonial authority in 1769, extended and clarified the right of coartación, the formal process by which an enslaved person could compel a sale at a price assessed by mutual appraisal.³ The resulting community of free people of color, the gens de couleur libres, held an intermediate legal position unique in North America: they could own property, sign contracts, sue and be sued, and bequeath estates. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, free people of color in New Orleans outnumbered the enslaved urban population in the city center and owned a substantial share of its taxable real estate.⁴

Tremé was the neighborhood those property owners built. They erected Creole cottages and shotgun houses in brick and cypress. They established barbershops, cigar factories, and groceries. They supported the St. Augustine Catholic Church, founded in 1842 on Tremé Street, where free people of color purchased the side pews and dedicated them to the enslaved workers whose masters bought the center pews.⁵ The church stood as the single physical monument to the principle that the free community of color would not yield its institutions to the racial order the antebellum state constructed around it.

Image pendingCongo Square, at the edge of the Vieux Carré, where enslaved and free Africans gathered on Sundays under the Code Noir, photographed or illustrated circa the 1840s.Sought from Historic New Orleans Collection, 1845

Congo Square and the roots of jazz

At the downtown edge of the neighborhood, fronting on St. Peter Street and opening onto what is now Louis Armstrong Park, lay a clearing the city called Place des Nègres and the community called Congo Square.⁶ On Sunday afternoons and on Catholic feast days, the Code Noir permitted enslaved workers to gather, trade, and perform. In New Orleans, local practice preserved the permission. Gatherings at Congo Square drew from several hundred to several thousand participants through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁷

The gatherings preserved African ceremonial traditions that had survived the Middle Passage and the plantation regime. Drummers maintained polyrhythmic patterns from Yoruba, Kongo, and Ewe traditions. Dancers performed the calinda, the bamboula, and other African-derived forms. Vendors sold herbs, cooked food, and crafts. The gatherings were neither spontaneous nor informal. They followed a social structure organized by nation, by the African ethnic identities the enslaved people carried from the continent, and by the spiritual and mutual-aid networks those identities sustained.⁸

Congo Square is, by the most carefully documented account in the historical record, the site where African musical traditions in North America survived in concentrated enough form to seed the art music of the next century. The musicologist Alan Lomax, who recorded Jelly Roll Morton’s autobiography for the Library of Congress in 1938, noted that Morton’s description of early New Orleans music ran directly back through the Tremé neighborhoods to the Congo Square gatherings of his grandparents’ generation.⁶ The historian Ned Sublette has documented the specific African rhythmic patterns that Congo Square preserved and their reappearance in the brass-band and piano traditions that produced jazz.⁷

The city closed Congo Square to public gatherings in 1843 under pressure from city council members who feared the assemblies facilitated communication between enslaved and free Black communities.¹ The clearing survived as a park. The gatherings continued in attenuated form through the Civil War and Reconstruction. After Reconstruction, as Jim Crow law replaced the Black Codes and the legal position of the free Black community collapsed toward that of the formerly enslaved, the social and musical life that Congo Square had sheltered migrated into the funeral traditions, the ballrooms, and the street parades of the neighborhood itself.

The second-line tradition, in which a brass band and a social club parade through the neighborhood and community members follow behind in the “second line,” had consolidated by the 1880s as the primary public form of Tremé musical and social life.⁹ Social aid and pleasure clubs organized the second lines. The clubs pooled dues to provide members with funerals, sick pay, and legal assistance, the informal mutual-insurance system that formal insurers refused to provide to Black New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition, in which Black men and women constructed elaborate feathered and beaded suits and paraded through the neighborhood on Mardi Gras day in an annual ceremony of kinship, resistance, and artistry, had also taken root in Tremé by the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

The neutral ground and the oaks

North Claiborne Avenue runs for several miles through the heart of the Seventh Ward and along the edge of Tremé. New Orleanians call the median strip of a wide boulevard the “neutral ground,” a term that dates to the early nineteenth century when the Spanish-settled American sector and the French Creole Vieux Carré faced each other across the Canal Street median.¹ The neutral ground on North Claiborne was not merely a traffic divider.

The city planted a double row of live oaks along the Claiborne neutral ground beginning in the 1880s. Live oaks in subtropical New Orleans grow to enormous spread, with canopies that can reach one hundred feet across. By the middle of the twentieth century, the double row had grown into a continuous canopy of roughly four hundred to five hundred mature trees, creating a green tunnel along the avenue that functioned as the neighborhood’s public commons.¹¹

Under the oaks, the neighborhood lived its public life. Social aid and pleasure clubs staged their second-line parades along the avenue, turning up from the side streets to march the length of the canopy with brass bands, sequined banners, and the rolling crowd of the second line behind them. Mardi Gras Indian tribes gathered there on Fat Tuesday morning, the meeting-and-masking ritual that brought the Yellow Pocahontas, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Golden Eagles, and dozens of other tribes out into the neutral ground in their full suits, each sewn by hand over the previous year.¹⁰

The neutral ground was also a commercial zone. Vendors set up stands under the oaks on weekends and holidays. The proprietors of the businesses along the avenue, which included insurance offices, pharmacies, beauty salons, barbershops, recording studios, and restaurants, understood the canopy as their commercial asset. The historian Richard Campanella has estimated that several hundred Black-owned businesses operated along North Claiborne by the 1940s and early 1950s, making the avenue the commercial heart of the Black Seventh Ward and a district with no equivalent on the white-owned streets of uptown New Orleans.¹²

Image pendingThe live oak canopy on the neutral ground of North Claiborne Avenue, photographed in the early 1950s, showing the double row of mature trees and the Black-owned commercial strip behind them.Sought from Historic New Orleans Collection, 1952

Robert Moses and the arterial plan

In 1946, the Louisiana Department of Highways and the New Orleans City Planning Commission invited Robert Moses to survey the city’s street and freeway needs. Moses arrived from New York with his team from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. His report, published that year as Arterial Plan for New Orleans, proposed an interlocking system of urban expressways that would connect the port, the downtown, and the outlying parishes.¹³

The report proposed two major elevated structures through the city’s historic core. The first ran along the riverfront through the Vieux Carré, an elevated expressway at the edge of the French Quarter that would carry traffic between the Central Business District and the docklands at the river’s bend. The second followed North Claiborne Avenue through the Tremé and the Seventh Ward, elevated on a concrete deck above the neutral ground.

Moses had built his reputation in New York by routing expressways through poor and Black neighborhoods while sparing white and wealthy ones. His Cross Bronx Expressway, begun the same year as the New Orleans report, cut through the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx over the explicit protests of residents and community organizations.¹⁴ In New Orleans, he applied the same logic with the same result. The riverfront route threatened the French Quarter, which white preservationists had organized to defend since the 1930s. The Claiborne route threatened the Black Seventh Ward and Tremé, whose residents had no comparable access to the planning process.

The Vieux Carré Expressway fight lasted eighteen years. The Vieux Carré Commission, led by Martha Robinson and supported by the Louisiana Landmarks Society, the American Institute of Architects, and ultimately the National Trust for Historic Preservation, organized a sustained campaign that eventually reached the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.¹⁵ In 1969, Secretary John Volpe, responding to the federal standard that required states to weigh effects on historic districts before approving highway routes, halted the riverfront expressway. The French Quarter’s architecture survived.

The Claiborne route generated no comparable federal intervention. Tremé’s residents and community organizations had no seat at the table where routes were drawn. The Louisiana Department of Highways and the Federal Highway Administration, which ran the federal planning process in the 1950s and 1960s, neither required nor documented meaningful consultation with the Black communities the routes displaced.¹⁶ The route that Moses had proposed for Claiborne Avenue advanced through the planning bureaucracy without the organized white-business and preservation opposition that had killed the riverfront project.

The construction and the cutting

The Louisiana Department of Highways began clearing the North Claiborne neutral ground in 1966. Workers cut the live oaks first. The number varies by source and by the counting method: the Claiborne Avenue History Project’s documentation and the accounts assembled by Campanella converge on a range of four hundred to five hundred trees, with some accounts citing individual large specimens that had stood for a century.¹² The cutting took several months. Residents watched from the galleries of their shotgun houses and from the storefronts along the avenue as the canopy came down, tree by tree, in what the community’s oral history consistently describes as a visible and sustained act of erasure.

The elevated structure rose on concrete columns above what had been the neutral ground. The deck carried I-10 traffic on a trajectory that ran northeast from the Central Business District through the Tremé and the Seventh Ward before curving east toward New Orleans East and the Chef Menteur corridor. The overpass opened to traffic in 1968. The construction cost approximately $30 million in 1960s dollars.¹⁷

The physical transformation was total. A neighborhood that had organized its public life around a green median became a neighborhood that lived beneath a concrete overpass, in permanent shadow along the avenue’s length, with traffic noise measuring at levels that health researchers later documented as chronically elevated above residential thresholds.¹⁸ The businesses that had operated under the oaks lost both the foot traffic the canopy drew and the physical premises many of them occupied. The oral histories the Claiborne Avenue History Project assembled in the 1990s and 2000s document owner after owner who closed rather than reopen under the overpass.¹¹

The homeowners along the avenue lost property value. The renters, who made up a large share of the residential population along the corridor, had no compensable interest in the taking and received nothing. The eminent-domain process displaced several hundred households from the right-of-way itself. In the surrounding blocks, the sound and shadow of the overpass accelerated the disinvestment that had already been gathering as white-flight suburbanization drained the city’s tax base and as redlining compressed Black mortgage access to the oldest and most deteriorated housing stock.¹⁹

Image pendingConstruction of the I-10 Claiborne elevated expressway above North Claiborne Avenue, 1967, with the concrete columns rising above the cleared neutral ground where the live oaks had stood.Sought from Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library, 1967

Displacement and what it cost

The physical removal of the oaks and the construction of the overpass were the most visible dimensions of the harm. The full accounting runs wider.

Black New Orleans in the late 1950s was already constrained by a housing market that combined formal segregation with the informal credit exclusion of the Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting guidelines. The FHA maps that redlined Black neighborhoods in New Orleans ran through Tremé and the Seventh Ward. Property owners in those areas could not obtain FHA-backed mortgages. They could not refinance. They could not leverage their equity to expand or repair their commercial properties.²⁰ The Claiborne construction arrived into that constrained condition and accelerated it. New investment stopped. Absentee landlords who saw no prospect of return deferred maintenance. The neighborhood that had sustained several hundred Black-owned businesses by the early 1950s was, by the early 1970s, a place from which capital had systematically exited.

The musicians and the second-line clubs did not leave. The Mardi Gras Indian tribes did not disband. The social aid and pleasure clubs continued to organize their parades. The community gathered under the overpass for the same Sunday functions the neutral ground had hosted under the oaks, in a form of collective refusal to accept the overpass as the permanent definition of the street.⁹ The Yellow Pocahontas tribe, whose chief Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana led the Mardi Gras Indian tradition through four decades of active practice, continued to mask and parade through the neighborhood as they had before the construction, and as they do today.¹⁰

The oral-history record is clear on one point that the aggregate statistics do not capture: residents did not experience the taking of the oaks as an incidental side effect of a neutral planning decision. They experienced it as an act directed at them. “They took the trees because they knew what the trees meant to us,” one longtime resident told a researcher for the Claiborne Avenue History Project.¹¹ The trees were not urban amenity. They were the material ground of a public life that could not be replicated in the acoustic and visual environment of the overpass.

The displacement also carried a deeper cultural cost that the property-value calculations did not register. The second-line and Mardi Gras Indian traditions that had developed in the Tremé and the Seventh Ward were not merely local recreation. They were the living institutional memory of the free Black community that had organized in these streets since the early nineteenth century. The social aid and pleasure clubs preserved the mutual-insurance function and the civic structure of earlier free Black associations. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition preserved kinship networks, craft traditions, and a form of ceremonial sovereignty over public space. The overpass did not end those traditions. It damaged the physical conditions for them and accelerated the economic disinvestment that made sustaining them harder.

Image pendingNorth Claiborne Avenue beneath the I-10 overpass, circa 1970s, showing vendors, community members, and parked cars occupying the space where the live-oak neutral ground had stood.Sought from Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, 1975

The organizers and the record they kept

The community’s response to the overpass began in the construction period and has continued without interruption for more than half a century.

The Claiborne Avenue History Project emerged from the community’s own archivists and oral historians in the years after Hurricane Katrina, drawing on the collections at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center.¹¹ The Amistad, the most comprehensive African-American research archive in the American South, holds the records of the New Orleans civil rights organizations, the mutual-aid societies, the NAACP Louisiana chapters, and the community newspapers that covered the Claiborne fight in real time. The project assembled photographs, business records, deed records, and oral histories from dozens of residents who remembered the avenue before and after the cutting.

The Ashé Cultural Arts Center, founded in Central City in 1998 by Carol Bebelle and Douglas Redd, became the institutional anchor of the post-Katrina fight to recover and extend the cultural infrastructure of Black New Orleans.²¹ Ashé’s programming connected the Mardi Gras Indian and second-line traditions to a broader framework of cultural sovereignty, insisting that the presence of those traditions in the streets was itself a form of claim on public space and public resources.

The Congress for the New Urbanism placed the removal of the Claiborne overpass on its national agenda in the early 2000s. CNU’s 2013 Freeways Without Futures report listed the Claiborne overpass among the twelve elevated urban freeways in the United States whose removal would most benefit the surrounding communities.²² The report cited traffic analysis showing that elevated urban freeways regularly carry far less traffic than predicted and that removal typically does not produce the traffic chaos that highway engineers predict. The Claiborne overpass carries approximately 68,000 vehicles per day, a volume that comparable surface boulevards in other cities have absorbed after removal.¹⁸

The city-commissioned Livable Claiborne Communities Study, conducted between 2010 and 2014, examined the economic, environmental, and community development conditions along the corridor and modeled three scenarios: enhanced management of the overpass, partial removal, and full removal.²³ The study found that full removal, combined with restoration of a surface boulevard and neutral ground, would produce the largest gains in property value, business activity, and public health along the corridor. The study documented the chronic health disparities in the communities adjacent to the overpass, including elevated rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and childhood lead exposure associated with freeway proximity.

The Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, set aside $1 billion over five years specifically for projects that remove or retrofit transportation infrastructure that had divided or degraded communities of color.²⁴ The Federal Highway Administration awarded planning grants under the program to the Claiborne corridor in 2022 and 2023, providing federal funding for the engineering studies and community engagement work that would precede any removal decision.²⁵ The grants represent the first time the federal government has formally acknowledged the harm the federal highway program inflicted on Tremé and the Seventh Ward.

What the organizers knew

The community organizations and researchers who have pressed for overpass removal have operated on a premise the highway engineers’ models do not capture: the overpass was not a neutral infrastructure investment that happened to fall in a Black neighborhood. The route was chosen, in a documented and deliberate process, because the neighborhood lacked the political resources to resist what the French Quarter had resisted.

The 1946 Moses arterial plan and its successors offer a clear record. The riverfront route and the Claiborne route both appeared in the same document. The same engineers evaluated both using the same criteria. The riverfront route died because white preservationists and merchants could mount a federal intervention. The Claiborne route survived because Tremé’s residents and organizations had no equivalent access to federal decision-makers. The asymmetry was not incidental. It reflected the same racially stratified planning regime that sent the Cross Bronx Expressway through East Tremont, the I-40 spur through Nashville’s Jefferson Street, and a dozen other mid-century expressways through Black commercial and residential corridors across the country.¹⁶

The Mardi Gras Indian tribes and the social aid and pleasure clubs understood this. They did not frame their continued practice under the overpass as adaptation to a permanent loss. They framed it as continuation of a claim. Big Chief Tootie Montana, who testified before the New Orleans City Council on the morning of his death in June 2005, said that the police harassment of second-line parades and Mardi Gras Indian gatherings throughout the 1970s and 1980s was an extension of the same regime that had taken the oaks. The council chambers were the venue. The argument was the same one the community had been making since 1966.¹⁰

The organizers also insisted on naming the archive. The Amistad Research Center’s holdings on Tremé and North Claiborne are among the most complete documentary records of any urban-renewal project in the country. They exist because the New Orleans civil rights and community organizations deposited their records at Amistad over many decades, and because researchers at Tulane and the Historic New Orleans Collection prioritized the documentary recovery of the Claiborne story alongside the post-Katrina work. The Claiborne Avenue History Project’s collection of photographs and oral histories is the community’s own archive, built by the community’s own researchers, and it remains accessible to the public through the Amistad.²⁶

Tremé, the overpass, and the present fight

The Claiborne overpass stands in 2026 as one of approximately a dozen urban elevated freeways whose communities have organized for removal and for which federal planning money has been committed or spent. The cases carry different timelines and different political configurations, but the essential pattern is the same as the pattern in the 1946 Moses report: the routes that urban renewal planners chose fell overwhelmingly on Black and Latino communities, and the routes those communities fought hardest to remove are the same ones.²²

The transfer of tools from Tremé to present-day fights is direct. The Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program that funded Claiborne planning grants also funded planning studies for the I-375 spur in St. Paul, which cut the Rondo neighborhood’s Black commercial district in 1963; for the I-40 Overton Park spur in Memphis; and for several other corridors whose histories parallel Claiborne’s exactly.²⁵ Claiborne researchers and community organizations assembled, over decades, the documented record on which Congress built, in part, the program’s federal framework. The evidence that route selection in the 1950s and 1960s was racially stratified came from Tremé, from East Tremont in the Bronx, from Nashville’s Jefferson Street, and from the comparative scholarship that assembled those cases into a national pattern.

The present-day organizers in the I-45 corridor in Houston, where the Texas Department of Transportation has proposed a multi-billion-dollar expansion that would remove several thousand additional households from the Midtown and Third Ward neighborhoods, have studied the Claiborne case and the Moses arterial plan in detail.²⁷ They cite the same asymmetry: the highway authority’s plans spare the wealthier, whiter neighborhoods and concentrate the taking on communities that already absorbed a generation of displacement. The Claiborne record shows what that argument looks like when it is assembled over decades by an organized community with an institutional archive, and what it can eventually produce in federal policy.

The Mardi Gras Indian tribes and the social aid and pleasure clubs will parade on Fat Tuesday 2026 through the streets of Tremé and the Seventh Ward, as they have every year since the overpass opened and for decades before the overpass existed. The Yellow Pocahontas tribe and the Golden Eagles will meet under the elevated deck on North Claiborne. The brass bands will turn up from the side streets. The second line will follow. The community, which the Moses arterial plan dismissed as an obstacle to route through rather than a constituency to hear, has kept its institutions, its practices, and its archive intact for more than two centuries. The overpass is a fifty-eight-year structure built on top of a two-hundred-year community. The community’s organizers have been clear, in every forum from the City Council chambers to the Federal Highway Administration, about which of those two things they expect to outlast the other.

Footnotes

1. Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2008. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Historic New Orleans Collection, “Faubourg Tremé: The History of a Neighborhood,” Williams Research Center, New Orleans. ↩

3. Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2, April 1991, pp. 173–200. ↩

4. Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868, Louisiana State University Press, 1997. ↩

5. St. Augustine Catholic Church, “A History of St. Augustine Parish,” New Orleans, 2012. ↩

6. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz,” Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950. ↩ ↩²

7. Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, Lawrence Hill Books, 2008. ↩ ↩²

8. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1998. ↩

9. Rachel Breunlin and Ronald W. Hernandez, “Putting the Neighborhood on the Map: Oral Histories from Tremé,” in The Neighborhood Story Project, Neighborhood Story Project, New Orleans, 2007. ↩ ↩²

10. Nicholas Spitzer, “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, pp. 43–73. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

11. Claiborne Avenue History Project, oral history collection and photographic archive, deposited at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

12. Richard Campanella, “A Neighborhood Divided,” Times-Picayune, February 4, 2007, and related geographic analyses published through the Tulane School of Architecture. ↩ ↩²

13. Robert Moses, Arterial Plan for New Orleans, Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, New York, 1946. Copy held at the New Orleans Public Library, City Archives. ↩

14. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, W. W. Norton, 2007. ↩

15. Richard O. Baumbach Jr. and William E. Borah, The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway Controversy, University of Alabama Press, 1981. ↩

16. Deborah N. Wei and Rachel Kamel, eds., Resistance in Paradise: Rethinking 100 Years of U.S. Involvement in the Caribbean and the Pacific, American Friends Service Committee, 1998; see also Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment, Oxford University Press, 2010, for comparative route-selection analysis. ↩ ↩²

17. Federal Highway Administration, “I-10 Gulf Coast History,” FHWA Infrastructure, U.S. Department of Transportation, 2022. ↩

18. U.S. Department of Transportation, Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program: Case Studies in Urban Freeway Impacts, FHWA, 2022. ↩ ↩²

19. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, Cambridge University Press, 1983; see also Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford University Press, 1985, for FHA redlining in southern cities. ↩

20. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford University Press, 1985. ↩

21. Ashé Cultural Arts Center, “About Ashé,” New Orleans, 2024. https://www.ashecac.org/about/ ↩

22. Congress for the New Urbanism, Freeways Without Futures 2013, CNU, Washington, D.C., 2013. ↩ ↩²

23. Greater New Orleans Foundation and the City of New Orleans, Livable Claiborne Communities: Summary Report, New Orleans, 2012. ↩

24. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Public Law 117-58, 117th Congress, November 15, 2021, Section 11509, Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program. ↩

25. Federal Highway Administration, “Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Awards,” U.S. Department of Transportation, 2022–2023. https://www.transportation.gov/grants/reconnecting-communities ↩ ↩²

26. Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans. https://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/ ↩

27. Texas Department of Transportation, “North Houston Highway Improvement Project (I-45),” TxDOT, 2023; see also Stop TxDOT I-45, public record submissions to the Federal Highway Administration, 2021–2023. ↩