Cities seized land from minorities to clear way for highways, and once again, if this was a total coincidence, that would still be bad. If cities planned to build highways through Black and white neighborhoods, then everyone complained, and cities bowed only to white complaints (as happened in Los Angeles, leading to the city's terrible traffic today), that would be bad. But worse than either of those, a lot of cities wanted to get rid of Black neighborhoods.
They saw the Black neighborhoods as diseased organs to be excised. Highway projects provided both the legal justification for destroying undesirable neighborhoods and the funding, since the federal government offered to pay 90 percent of the costs. The process was dubbed "white roads through black bedrooms."
Cities called the doomed areas “blighted,” a misleading term that brings to mind abandoned buildings that are already collapsing. That's not what these areas were (inhabited neighborhoods rarely are). A lot of these neighborhoods, the worst thing you could honestly say about them is they were poor, and some of them weren't even that.
So, in Miami, the city labeled Overtown a slum and kicked out 10,000 Black residents so they could build I-95. St. Louis did the same for Mill Creek Valley, expelling 20,000 Black families to build I-64. Nashville built I-40, demolishing six Black churches along with dozens of apartment buildings and hundreds of houses. Similar stuff went on with Jackson Ward in Richmond and Black Bottom in Detroit and the 15th Ward in Syracuse and Sugar Hill in Los Angeles and in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and so many cities we're not even going to name them all.