• Length analyzed: Approximately 11 miles
• Six lanes with an estimated minimum 284-foot wide impact zone

While Interstate 20 runs from West Texas to South Carolina, we examined the approximately 11 miles within the Atlanta city limits, including the massive intersection with the Interstate 75/85 downtown connector.² I-20’s route was chosen deliberately, as noted in the story below, to divide white and Black neighborhoods at the time. Its meandering route was designed to protect certain neighborhoods and devastate others, as well as to provide a barrier that would last for decades to come.

I-20 consumes at least 572 acres and $150 million in taxable land, according to 2021 Atlanta land assessments³

Without the homes that previously existed within the I-20 corridor, the city lost the ability to tax at least $676 million in homevalue, costing the city at least $6.4 million in property taxes each year

I-20 displaced at least 7,500 people in 1960, 40 percent of whom were Black.

It destroyed an estimated 2,200 homes, wiping out $596,000 in average home equity, if those homes existed today.

But in reality, that was as much about marketing the city to the rest of the country and the world as the aviation industry exploded and Atlanta’s economy was on the rise.

The city was a nexus of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and progressed ahead of other southern cities through what could charitably be called a more pragmatic approach to integration, but Atlanta was also not radically different from the rest of the South. Black Americans, including GIs returning from WWII, were moving to the city in search of economic opportunity, and white Atlantans were making every effort to segregate a city in which the KKK was still very active.

Street names were routinely changed so that white residents would not have to share similar addresses with Black residents and streets were built around Black neighborhoods to create physical barriers. Even Mayor Ivan Allen, who defeated a staunch racist segregationist for his first term as mayor and is rightfully celebrated for his support of the civil rights movement, was central to an effort to put a physical wall across a southwest neighborhood to keep Black people from moving northward.

With the creation of the Interstate Highway System, Atlanta’s leaders (and perhaps more so the state) now had a powerful tool for removing certain people and building even more walls. The east-west Interstate 20 was used deliberately to create a boundary between white Atlantans on the north and Black Atlantans to the south. Even in the city “too busy to hate,” Black neighborhoods were targeted to make way for new interstates, primarily designed to carry white suburban commuters into the city, fueling the next several decades of incredible suburban expansion in nearly all directions.

As just one example, Sweet Auburn (Avenue) was one of the centers of Black culture and life in Atlanta, full of residents, businesses, culture, and nightlife, once called the richest African American street in the country. 7 Even before the creation of the interstate system, a north-south expressway through downtown was proposed to curve east and slice directly through Sweet Auburn to avoid cutting through the central business district just to the west.

The many interstates (and massive interchanges) that followed separated white and Black communities in Atlanta and accelerated the flow of white Atlantans to the suburbs. (And in later years, many Black Atlantans as well.) Over the course of the 1960s, 60,000 whites left the city, and many interstates later, in the 1970s, they were joined by 100,000 more. Locals quipped that Atlanta was “The City Too Busy Moving to Hate.”

Interstate 20 largely followed an east/west line between predominantly white neighborhoods on the north and Black neighborhoods to the south. As Kevin Kruse wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear. Interstate 20…was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor [William] Hartsfield, as ‘the boundary between the white and Negro communities’ on the west side of town. Black neighborhoods, he hoped, would be hemmed in on one side of the new expressway, while white neighborhoods on the other side of it would be protected.”

And then consider Interstate 485, the unbuilt massive north- south highway, proposed to be built directly through some of the most prosperous and politically powerful white neighborhoods in the eastern side of the city near Piedmont Park, which was ultimately defeated and never built.