Interstate (Oscar Corral, Haleem Muksin, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 15) my husband Charles and I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church for a screening of Interstate, a 2026 documentary film by Oscar Corral and Haleem Muhsin which depicted how the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s was routed in ways that destroyed economically thriving African-American communities and dispossessed residents that had owned their own homes for generations, forcing them to become renters or mortgage holders. The film focused on five cities where this happened: Miami, Florida (whose Black Overtown district was targeted and where Corral and Muhsin started their research; they originally planned a short film about Overtown but ended up expanding it); St. Paul, Minnesota; New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Montgomery, Alabama. The situation in Montgomery was the worst of all because there the person in charge of constructing the interstate highway system was Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt, Jr., the closest this film has to a hissable villain. Engelhardt was also the head of the Montgomery branch of the White Citizens’ Council, which can best be thought of as the above-ground political branch of the Ku Klux Klan the way Sinn Fein was the above-ground political branch of the Irish Republican Army. The White Citizens’ Council did the lobbying and strategizing of the white South’s bitter-end resistance to integration, while the Klan supplied the terrorist “muscle” to enforce the status quo. Engelhardt got the job of local contact and supervisor of the interstate highway system in Montgomery in 1956, with the wounds of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott still fresh. Armed with the weapon of eminent domain, the government’s ability to take people’s private property supposedly for the “public good” (though all too often it’s just been to reallocate it to bigger-pocketed and more politically influential private interests in the scam known as “redevelopment”), Engelhardt deliberately targeted the people who had led the bus boycott, specifically Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second-in-command. Fortunately he misread the map and Abernathy’s home was spared (though one right next door to it was condemned), but his church was targeted and destroyed.

This sad story has been repeated in American history again and again; I couldn’t help but think of the riots that destroyed the Black business community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 as well as the more recent battles over artificial intelligence data centers. As with the interstate highway system, data centers are being presented to communities across the U.S. (including white rural communities whose residents thought this would only happen to people of color, not them) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. People are being told their hard-earned equity must be sacrificed on the altar of “progress” and they’re going to have to live with the eyesores and noise pollution (one thing this film stressed was the public health dangers of living next to a freeway, especially the higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease, and asthma, all of which gets cited by white racists as “proof” that African-Americans and other people of color are “racially inferior” because they don’t live as long). One of the sorriest aspects of this film was the appearance of Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation under President Joe Biden, who talked up the provision of the Infrastructure Restoration Act of 2023 that set up a program to restore, as much as possible, the physical connections between segments of the African-American community that were bisected by the interstates. Then the film’s closing credits noted that in 2025 the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress eliminated all funding for this program, and in 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the few remaining provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Southern and border states raced to reapportion their congressional and state legislative districts to eliminate the few footholds of Black representation that had been eked out after 1965.

The point was that one of the reasons the Black community got so thoroughly screwed by the interstate highway program was that they had no political representation to speak of, and those are the “good old days” to which the whites who dominate the South and (less so) the rest of the country want to return. At the same time Corral and Muhsin, restricted to a one-hour running time, only touched on some of the broader issues raised by the interstate highway system – like why it had to be based on private cars at all. They show a brief clip of Robert Moses, the New York parks commissioner and construction supervisor, who was key in making sure the transportation system of America’s future would be based on private cars rather than mass transit – and who, according to his biographer Robert A. Caro, didn’t have to worry about the aggravation of traffic because he was always driven rather than having to drive himself.