Old South Baton Rouge was the heart of Black Baton Rouge — shotgun houses and Creole cottages built from the 1880s on, the city's first public school for Black children, a full corridor of churches, doctors, funeral homes, groceries, and music. In 1953, from these blocks, Baton Rouge ran the first mass-action bus boycott in the country. Montgomery studied how Baton Rouge did it two years before Montgomery did it. This is the ground that taught the movement the tactic.
Beginning in 1958 the state routed Interstate 10 — and later I-110 — straight through it. More than four hundred houses came down for the elevated road; hundreds of businesses with them; thousands of people displaced. By late 1964 the six lanes had physically cut Black children off from the schools they walked to. It was not an accident of engineering. Across the country the interstate was aimed at neighborhoods exactly like this one, and called slum clearance while it was done.
The neighborhood did not disappear; it was halved and it stayed. People still live in Old South Baton Rouge, and every June they hold Juneteenth in the shade of the interstate that was built to move them — on the ground where they taught America how to boycott a bus. The houses the road took are gone. What they were for is still there.
