WLRN Public Media | By Stephen Robb | Miami Times
It’s 1956, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower just signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Across the nation, urban planners from dozens of cities faced a tough choice as they considered where to send the bulldozers:
Which neighborhoods would they tear down?
For the filmmakers behind “Interstate,” a documentary getting its world premiere at the Miami Film Festival on Friday night, the choice those planners made didn’t seem tough at all. Throughout the U.S., government officials sent cranes to thriving Black and minority neighborhoods, ripping communities apart for the sake of increasing transportation.
According to co-directors and Miami natives Oscar Corral and Haleem Muhsin, the documentary started as a short film about the cultural damage that occurred when I-95 plowed through Overtown. But soon, research would lead them to realize that what happened to Overtown had not been an isolated or abnormal event.
This story was originally produced by WLRN, South Florida’s only public radio station at 91.3 FM, as part of a content sharing partnership with MIA Media Group. Read more at WLRN.org
