Timothy Williams’ family has lived in the same community for over 150 years, but he is afraid that they are one big storm away from losing it all due to plans for highway expansion.

Eight years ago, the Alabama Department of Transportation widened the highway that runs just a few yards from Williams’ home in Shiloh. Since then, every time it rains, water has flowed down the highway, flooding his land with enough force to erode over a foot of soil every single storm.

The dilemma has already cost him and his neighbors, who live in a rural, majority-Black community, thousands of dollars and led to him losing his home insurance.

As he has learned more about the history of highways and their connections to Black land loss, Williams has a word for what Alabama has been doing to Black communities with its highway projects: “intentional.”

So when he heard that the state was pushing forward on a 52-mile highway around Birmingham that would pave over wetlands and streams, making flooding more likely, it felt like another example.

“It seems though they would have graduated from that,” he said, about building new roads in floodzones.

The state has asked the federal government for permission to fill over an acre of wetlands with concrete to build a highway through rural, but growing areas around Birmingham. The project, critics argue, will push water onto other communities the same way U.S. Highway 84 pushed it onto Williams.

“This is a part of a pattern of plowing through and not considering the harms that may result,” explained Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who is often referred to as the “father of environmental justice” for his work documenting environmental racism since the 1980s.

The story of American highways and Black communities is not new. From the 1950s onward, the Interstate Highway System was routed through Black neighborhoods, displacing an estimated 475,000 families and demolishing communities from Birmingham to Baltimore. But the pattern did not end with the interstate era.

Read the full article about how highway expansion harms Black communities by Adam Mahoney at Capital B News.