The $3 billion project is expected to begin about two years after the plan becomes final. South Carolina is proposing to sweep aside dozens of homes, and potentially hundreds of people, to widen a freeway interchange choked with traffic in this booming coastal region. It’s happening now a few miles north of Charleston with the proposed West I-526 Lowcountry Corridor, at a time when President Biden and his transportation secretary have vowed to stop it.
The dismantling of Black communities for state and federal highways is not just a thing of the past.
“If they don’t take my house,” she said, “I’m going to be just in a little corner, in a little hole by myself. But now, as state officials plan another major road expansion, Anderson is offering to sell them her land and leave. Weary-eyed and feeling all of her 85 years, Hattie Anderson doesn’t want to fight anymore.įor most of her life, she held on to the large plot of land that she and her late husband Samuel pinched pennies to buy - even after the state ran a freeway through their mostly Black community, after the city used eminent domain to take nearly nine acres for a sewage drain, and after the state added a beltway.