StoryCorps: Communities Building a New Path Forward
Across the country, communities are building new paths forward by rethinking how transportation can reconnect them decades after transportation policy disrupted lives and divided neighborhoods that were more often home to families of color and those with low incomes.
In 2024, RWJF and StoryCorps brought together neighbors, family members, students, and teachers from impacted communities across America to discuss what change might look like.
The places we live, learn, work, and play should offer everyone the chance to be as healthy as possible. To realize this vision, local leaders need to prioritize the health and wellbeing of all residents when they are thinking about where to build roads, highways, sidewalks, and public transit. Regardless of your ZIP code, every person should live in safe, stable, and affordable housing, have access to healthy foods, clean drinking water, and the ability to safely travel between home, work, grocery stores, and family and friends with ease.
But we know this has not always been the case in the past. And even today, neighborhoods that are home to people of color and people with low incomes are often likely to be displaced first to make way for transit projects or other development. In their wake, we see divided communities that tear people away from local stores, schools, churches, and culture. What’s left behind is a trail of negative health impacts and heartache.
There is a growing movement in the impacted communities across the country, made possible with funding from federal and local governments, to take steps to right these past harms, reconnect communities, and create the resources that allow residents to be healthier and thrive on their own terms. RWJF partnered with StoryCorps to capture the stories of people who are working to create new, community-led solutions to transform the neighborhoods they call home.
StoryCorps is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived interviews with over 650,000 participants, creating the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. The recordings are archived online and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Together, We Thrive
Listen to the voices of community leaders across the United States talking about their love for their communities and the solutions they’re working toward to right the past harms caused by transportation policy that ripped their neighborhoods and sacred spaces apart.
Story Index
Reclaiming Sacred Ground
Wilbur Slockish and Carol Logan tell their story of years of work to restore the Place of Big, Big Trees, a sacred place of healing and for religious ceremonies.
Reviving a Streetcar Legacy
A longtime El Paso, Texas native Nestor Valencia shares his connection to the city’s streetcars with former councilperson Steve Ortega.
Protecting Community and Culture
Neighbors Suzanne Lee and Alex Chan discuss how the creation of Boston’s I-90 impacted the health and culture of Chinatown.
Reconnecting Rondo
Nathaniel Khaliq shares the story of his parents and the community of Rondo in Minnesota to inspire his granddaughter, Mackenzie Davis, to never give up on fighting for what is right.
Looking to Science
Adrienne Katner, professor, and her former graduate student, Jackie Mornay, talk about pollution caused by a highway and how it impacts residents' health.
Not Just Living—It’s Me Thriving
Lanessa Owens-Chaplin and Ryedell Davis, community leaders and neighbors in Syracuse, N.Y., discuss their vision for the open land caused by the removal of the I-80 viaduct.
Highways Revisited
Professor Daniel D’Oca and his former student, Bruno Rodriguez Escobedo, talk about using urban design to build connections.
Remembering Hastings Street
Writer Marsha Philpot speaks of the history of Hastings Street, once a vibrant main street in her hometown of Detroit.
Community is Action
Friends and community leaders, Vannessa Mason-Evans and Bonita Green, speak of the love for their community and growing up in Durham, North Carolina.
Guiding the Future
Reverend Dr. Warren L. Herndon and Clinton Cozart, friends and longtime residents, reminisce about Durham, North Carolina’s Black Wall Street.
Preserving History
Emma Devine and Constance Wright recall childhood trips to Hayti, the center of Black culture and economic growth in Durham, North Carolina.
Reclaiming Sacred Ground from Highway 26 Expansion
Wilbur Slockish and Carol Logan share about The Place of Big, Big Trees. It has been a sacred place for them and their tribes for thousands of years. It is a place of healing and religious ceremonies, a powerful place where their loved ones and ancestors are buried in peace.
However, The Place of Big, Big Trees was torn down by the Oregon Department of Transportation to expand Highway 26 to improve travel for tourists and nearby ski resorts. But after 15 years of protesting and fighting their case in the courts, Wilbur, Carol, and their tribal communities won the opportunity to restore The Place of Big, Big Trees. Despite the long road of pain, they will see their sacred site restored and enjoy the place where generations on can come rejoice in their heritage.
This gave El Pasoans the opportunity to travel to Juarez and buy goods such as meat and shoes that were not available in their town, especially during times of food shortages. Nestor’s fond memories of the streetcars, that were discontinued in 1973, with the support of Steve helped to bring about their return to El Paso.
Protecting Community and Culture
Alex Chan interviews his former teacher, Suzanne Lee, about her connection to Boston’s Chinatown—how she remembers it and how different it is from the Chinatown Alex knows—one diminished by the I-90 freeway.
Reconnecting Rondo: Never Give Up
Mackenzie Davis asks her grandfather, Nathaniel Khaliq, about their family history in the community of Rondo. He shares how the Rondo neighborhood was a close-knit Black community in Saint Paul, Minnesota that was irreparably damaged when the I-94 highway was built directly through it starting in the late 1950s.
Looking to Science
Professor Adrienne Katner chats with her former graduate student Jackie Mornay about the effects of the Claiborne Expressway on Tremé—one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods.
Shadows of the Highway: Not Just Living—It’s Me Thriving
Lanessa Owens-Chaplin and Ryedell Davis were raised in Syracuse, New York’s former 15th Ward. They talk about how the I-81 Viaduct was a giant in the story of their childhoods, bringing pollution into their ward and stripping Black people of land ownership when it was built in the early 1960s.
Highways Revisited
Daniel D’Oca, an urban planner and professor, speaks with one of his former students, Bruno Rodriguez Escobedo, about urban design bringing people of all walks of life together to slow down and connect instead of driving them apart.
Remembering Hastings Street: The Wealth of Black Bottom, Detroit
Writer Marsha “Music” Philpot remembers growing up in Detroit. Her father owned a record store in the Black Bottom neighborhood on its main thoroughfare—Hastings Steet—where many of the neighborhood’s Black-owned businesses were and where the construction of I-375 came through.
Community is Action: Advocating Together
Friends and local community leaders Vannessa Mason-Evans and Bonita Green reminisce about growing up in Durham, North Carolina—how they knew their neighbors and their neighbors knew them and how rooted their sense of community was.
Guiding the Future Through History
Friends Reverend Dr. Warren Herndon and Clinton Cozart trade stories about their heydays growing up in Durham, North Carolina, and remember when it was a place of empowerment and economic opportunity for Black people, including the Black Wall Street—a thriving district with over 100 Black-owned businesses.
Due to the construction of Highway 147 and gentrification in the city’s African American neighborhoods, many Black businesses were systematically removed, and Black-owned land was lost. Dr. Warren and Clinton work to carry on the history and the legacy of Durham’s Black Wall Street by educating the youth in their community.
Hayti was seen as a source of economic pride by some and as a place to be destroyed by others. Construction of Highway 147 took away most of the neighborhood, leaving very little for the businesses to return to, but Emma and Constance remember and remind us all that history should not be destroyed but preserved.
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