Why is South Carolina still building roads on top of Black communities?

‘They are destroying everything that was given to us [...] by our parents and foreparents.’ Photograph: gguy44/Getty Images/iStockphoto

For decades, Bobbie Anne Hemingway Jordan lived on the same property, in the house where she was born. Her backyard was often filled with the sound of her two dozen grandkids as they ran to and from the park next door. For generations, Hemingway Jordan’s family lived and farmed on the land, and the 82-year-old believed it would be passed down to future generations as well. “I thought it would be left to my children, and they could leave it to their children,” she said.

Then, in 2021, appraisers offered to buy the land and her house. The sum she received for her three-bedroom, two-bath house was just enough money to purchase a one-bedroom apartment in a nearby community.

In April of this year, Hemingway Jordan moved out. “I didn’t think I’d ever have to leave that land,” she said from her new apartment. “All the memories I’ve got, all the love, the things that happened on that property – they couldn’t pay me enough for that.”

Hemingway Jordan grew up in Sandridge, a small, majority-Black community in South Carolina where longtime residents say their homes are being sacrificed to build a controversial infrastructure project. The Conway Perimeter Road would span four lanes and connect two existing highways and allegedly cut travel time for those headed to the nearby beach – and it would also mean destroying at least six homes in Sandridge.

“They are destroying everything that was given to us [...] by our parents and foreparents, who just wanted to give us a community, to give us a place to call home,” said the Rev Cedric Blain-Spain, who has been campaigning against the road since 2019. “Our legacy, it means nothing to them.”

In addition to demolishing half a dozen homes, the new road would also split the community in two, making it harder for residents to travel within their own neighborhood. Trips to the grocery store or church will take longer for those who stay.

As the Biden administration releases funding to remediate communities where homes were once sacrificed to make room for highways, the case of Sandridge shows how the impacts of new road developments are still disproportionately falling on Black communities.

Using highways to divide Black communities has a long history in the United States. Take virtually any city in the country and overlay demographic data over highways, and you can see that the largest burden of construction falls on African American communities, according to Julian Agyeman, a critical urban planner and professor at Tufts University.

“These highways were not accidents,” he said. “Urban planning is the spatial toolkit of racial segregation.”

Sandridge, which was established by Black sharecroppers in the mid-1800s, has been around for generations. Residents are mostly Black and elderly, and many are related to each other. It has historic value: one of the first Black-owned grocery stores in the state was opened in Sandridge.

In recent years, the community has faced other large infrastructure projects. In 2017, the utility company Dominion Energy (then known as SCE&G) used eminent domain to build a gas pipeline through several properties in Sandridge.

Blain-Spain believes this development only encouraged the perception of Sandridge as “a path of least resistance”, for other projects. “Ever since [then], we became an open market for SCE&G and the county,” he said.

Those who remain in Sandridge will soon have a four-lane road in their backyard – literally – and all the increased air pollution, traffic and noise that comes with car-centric infrastructure. But the new road will barely affect any of the largely white, newer developments around Sandridge.

The Guardian contacted SCDOT and Horry county for comment. SCDOT said the Federal Highways Office of Civil Rights was investigating the complaint and that they would not comment on the case. Horry county did not respond.

Agyeman, the urban planner, said many of the communities where the nation’s highways were built were already redlined, in food deserts or otherwise divided. Historically, whiter and wealthier communities that had access to political, legal and economic power to sway infrastructure decisions were largely spared from the process known as urban renewal, through which many US cities were modernized afterthe second world war, often at the expense of Black communities.

This history of discrimination is so blatant that the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced a new $185m grant this year to reconnect communities where residents have been displaced by infrastructure projects.

The South Carolina chapter of the NAACP filed a Title VI complaint in April 2022 alleging that the state and the county violated the civil rights of Black residents in the design, planning and implementation of the Conway Perimeter Road. The complaint was accepted by the Federal Highway Administration in January 2023.

The way projects such as the pipeline or the perimeter road encroach on communities like Sandridge “continuously lowers the value of those properties and makes it easier for the next road or the next infrastructure project to come [in]”, said Joe Schottenfeld, assistant general counsel at NAACP.

Sandridge is not the only Black community in South Carolina affected by planned highway development. In North Charleston, 94% of people that will be displaced by a project to widen a freeway interchange live in communities composed of mostly Black and brown residents.

For now, most Sandridge residents have packed up their homes and started to leave, bidding goodbye to their family legacies.

“This has been devastating to me and my siblings,” said Carmella Spain, a 53-year-old woman whose property is slated to be demolished. The property includes the house her father built and that she grew up in. Earlier this year, Spain helped her sister pack up that house to make way for a highway that won’t benefit her or her community.

“I just wish we could go back to living the way we used to,” said Spain. “I hate that they are coming through to destroy a community that has been there for many years. To no longer be the community we once were.”

• This article was amended on 28 July 2023 to correct the timeline of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP’s Title VI complaint.