"Road to Nowhere" by Emily Lieb

In the mid-1950s, Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically.In Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, writer and historian Emily Lieb tells the history of the neighborhood and the highway that never happened. The book reveals the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some 900 homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals. “It took me a while to see what an important role Baltimore’s public schools played in Rosemont’s story—but once I did, it changed the way I thought about the whole book,” said Lieb. “Initially, I thought I was telling a story about a highway that started in the 1950s and ended two decades later. Instead, I was telling a much longer story about a whole city, one that started right after the Civil War and continues through today.”Baltimore was a Jim Crow city, which means that until 1954, its schools were legally segregated. Decisions school officials made about whether a school was going to serve white students or Black ones determined where Baltimoreans could live, since families were unlikely to settle where their children could not go to school. Many people assume segregated neighborhoods made segregated schools, but in Baltimore, it was the other way around. Through World War II, segregated schools kept most of West Baltimore’s schools for Black students—and, by extension, most of its Black population— concentrated in the older parts of the city. By the early 1950s, though, those old schools and neighborhoods were getting run-down and overcrowded. Rather than desegregating so that families could live and go to school where they liked, officials started to convert white-branded schools in the newer parts of West Baltimore into schools for Black students. And as soon as the city made it possible for their children to go to school in those newer neighborhoods, middle-class Black homeowners started to move in. That’s what created Rosemont.Segregated schools were good business because they created a captive market. Prospective Black homebuyers had a limited supply of housing to choose from, which inflated the price. And they also could not pay for their housing using the same kinds of affordable, government-insured mortgage loans that banks started offering their white counterparts during the New Deal. Instead, they typically had to get both their houses and their loans from the speculative real-estate companies known as “blockbusters.” That meant they paid more for their homes, and they paid more for the money they used to buy them.Blockbusting leached the wealth of the families who moved to Rosemont during the 1950s and early 1960s, but by itself, it didn’t keep the neighborhood from being the kind of place people scrimped and saved for and dreamed about living in. Still, over time, all the little things blockbusting took from Rosemonters started to add up. So, by the time city and state officials were looking for a neighborhood to bulldoze for an expressway, they could point t