It’s been documented extensively how the Nixon administration coldly and cruelly used “freeway” planning for cars to destroy non-white neighborhoods across America.

Many don’t realize an “Eisenhower” interstate system was in fact spearheaded by VP Nixon, who later unleashed wrecking balls and bulldozers on black neighborhoods in a racist campaign to destroy non-white power in America.

In short, federal funding was directed into tearing down successful businesses and peaceful homes in urban areas where many Blacks were thriving — a repeat of the 1921 Tulsa firebombing that destroyed “Black Wall Street”.

A huge asphalt project would run straight through the center of a community, destroying neighborhoods by dividing and devastating a local economy. It aimed to replace prosperity with rubble and prevent freedom of movement under the false campaign of improvement (“urban renewal”).

Moreover, data shows Nixon’s racist “transit” plan was not only immediately detrimental but delivered “death corridors” by directing high-speed vehicles with little accountability into areas with high numbers of unprotected pedestrians and cyclists.

Recent news carries just some of the heart-breaking stories, experienced for decades yet rarely reported. Here are just three of many examples:

1. Deadliest street…in Chicago
2. Rising US traffic deaths put focus on one Philadelphia road
3. Somerville ‘Corridor of Death’…

The Philadelphia news has the money quote:

“You would not design a street or a road like that today,” said Christopher Puchalsky, policy director for Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. “It feels like an expressway, but it’s in the middle and between neighborhoods.”

It was in the middle and between neighborhoods by design. It was setup as a death trap by design.

Minneapolis news gives even more detail:

The federal government provided 90 percent of the funding in the Twin Cities to build I-94 and 35W. […] “The African American, the elders, and they were prominent African Americans living at that time in Minneapolis. They said they had no idea what was going on until a bulldozer came in tearing down trees and moving dirt,” he recalled from his research. Thousands of homes and businesses in the interstate’s path were destroyed or removed. “Every pocket of African American neighborhood, urban area, in the United States, you will find a highway border them, splitting them up or dismantled the entire community altogether,” Lloyd told FOX 9. “Why would transportation policy, which is racist in itself, would disrupt and destroy a neighborhood like this?” When asked if it was intentional, he replied, “To say that, was it intentional? It hurts me to say yes, it hurts me to say yes.”

The correlation set forward by President Nixon (keep non-whites poor, kill the poor) thus provides the simple explanation to present-day data analysis.

A recent Governing analysis found poorer neighborhoods record significantly higher per-capita pedestrian death rates — typically twice that of other communities. […] American Indians die in pedestrian crashes at approximately double the rate of other racial and ethnic groups, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

It is not an exaggeration to say Nixon hated Black people and wanted them disenfranchised and dead, using any means possible.

Like Ronald Reagan the national policy of Nixon was defined by high levels of racism, rolling out campaigns to excite a white power base desperate to prevent equality and freedom to all Americans.

Meanwhile some might try to assign fault on drivers (recklessness mixed with rising vehicle power) and others want to blame pedestrians for failing to stay inside a racist box (jaywalking is a fantasy crime).

Both of these mere symptoms miss the far more important underlying American history. And it’s perhaps most important to understand that before driverless cars surely will interpret as green light to kill and make far worse.

The bottom line is American road planning, grounded in Nixon’s white supremacist platform, was intended as state-sanctioned means to murder the poor and that’s exactly what it’s been doing.