in history is about affirmative action. and it's something i published 1981 and it reads like was written yesterday but anyway so the process putting together the text was one thing but there were some image issues i wanted to put in as i mean and this book has illustrations. did you, were you in art school? yes, i did photography and then kind of you know, now that we're in branding but yeah. and i do illustrations, so, you know, okay, you know, the between fine art illustration. so i'm illustration even though when was in art school what exactly. yeah. and i was in painting programs so it making paintings and fine

art and you supposed to be autonomous in sense that it relates only itself. illustration relates to something of it and so much of black art had been dismissed as illustration because it talked the society, it talked about history, it talked people, it talked about white supremacy and racism was an illustration but in. 2022 i did a residency at. and i got to know a professor of illustration and he taught me a term which is editorial illustrator issue so i say that's what i was it it looked editorial illustration because it responds to text but it also thoughtful with visual meaning

but it me a long time to pull together my art made my hand and my compute to do with the words i to use. so in this book you will see some very wordy pieces and those are some of the later pieces. so when i had together the collection of and this would have been around 2000 to i realized that there were some things i needed to capture visually. so i had a residency at yaddo and i had a big wall and so i made my art and i put it up on my wall and. you'll see it. the process of putting together the essays was one, and the process making and putting together the illustrations was another. so i used a wall to put up the

pieces that i was not of the ones on the wall made it into this book think. i am curious about what you said about afro pessimism and why you think it's so widespread. why do you think it's so durable? and if there's an antidote, oh, those are hard questions to answer. one reason i think it's so attracted is that there is so much it. i mean, we keep having police brutality, we keep having discrimination, we keep having white supremacy. we keep having all the bad things that happen to black people. those things keep happening. so for instance, when when i say to people i don't think we're

going to get to to have to deal with the trump presidency. they said, oh, i'm so relieved you're an optimist. i said, no, i'm not an optimist. i've lived too long, black in the united states to be an optimist i cannot be an optimist. but on the other, i see that things changed. this is one of the i mean, one of the early responses to i just keep talking the book was a list of. 45 of the best books this spring by author women of color. and i thought. 45 in the olden that could never happen. it couldn't live. i mean, just to get 45 books out in the world by black women

authors would have been amazing. and then to limit it to one season and then to say, well, are the best ones. so that couldn't happened. so when children are truth of life, the symbol came out i'll give you another index to some of you remember maybe three years ago when it was big news that sojourner was able to go to court and get her son back and. the archivist had found the actual artifact. you remember that. it was big news. take my for it. well, there were three scholarly biographies of sojourner truth around the time i published mine was one. margaret washington was occurred to me. this was another all three of us. six explained this. we all said, this is what happened. she went to court. she got her son back.

it was not news. the people who cared about that story were us. and then a years ago it was national news. so people ask me, why are you writing another book about sojourner? to say sojourner truth has changed so. that's one big reason. and another reason that the people say these things are really writers. they are such good writers. they really. so there's there's enough bad stuff. they're really good writers. and we always explanations. so we have a hunger and i think for younger people who don't this decades long. i mean can i can remember half a

century ago i mean real well but i can remember half a century ago and younger people don't have. i'll give you one last example so i go to a senior strength trainee class in the montclair y and the guy who runs it his name is john nice old white and he plays music from before the mid-sixties. i can't and it because and i said to him john, this is horrible. this is what's the matter with it? i said, that's the music from segregation time. he says oh, i never thought of it that way, but i segregation i grew up in california where there segregation time. this is not to take us to the hard states in the south so

things have changed young people thankfully didn't to live through the fifties and early sixties. and there's some really good writers who are giving us this narrative. i talked about. anita hill yeah, i just wanted to say i can vouch for was lindsey was during that time. but i also wanted mention that, you know, we were going through this election right? and we see a lot of disillusionment amongst people in general about voting and from my perspective, it seems as though people put too much faith in voting they don't what i mean is they don't seem to understand that that's the beginning of the

process and that how things really get changed, that it takes more than just voting. and i wonder you had any thoughts about that? well, i agree. you and new concern. i agree with you. 100%. but i think i would put less emphasis on how it has to be the first step. i think i would say the essential step, but i would agree with you in how it all turns out. yeah, absolutely. so for me to be so to thank you both so much. enjoyed both of your books immensely so thank you. i wanted to ask a historian's so i wanted to ask in your long and distinguished career as a historian what the what your favorite developments in black

history have been as a field and where you're excited about the field is going. that's like asking a mother, which is her favorite, and usually it's the most recent. but i always said that my favorite book, which know this is not exactly what you ask, but this is how i'm going to answer it for a long time was hozier, hudson. this was the book my class editor turned because when hudson and i went to see hudson lectured him about how the republicans and the democrats are just the same thing and you're not going to make any difference. you vote communist. he did not target wen's heartstrings, and he was still very much alive. you know, this is what it is that this is like the seventies

is the late seventies. so this is like antebellum america. and my editor said, but he doesn't tug at heartstrings and in those days a black man had to tug at one's heartstrings to get published by alfred aiken off, you know. any other questions questions? okay. well thank you so much, nell and zindzi, can we give them one more round of applause.

our author today. megan kimball is my name. the way i should say this first is gilbert garcia. i'm an opinion writer and columnist with the san antonio express-news, but that's not

important. important here is our author, megan kimball. she's an austin based investigative journalist, author of the 2015 book unprocessed. she's a former executive editor of the texas observer. she writes about housing and urban development for texas monthly, the new york times guardian and, bloomberg, citylab. her latest book, which came out a few days ago, is called city limits inequality and the future america's highways. and it examines the toll that ever expanding urban highways have taken on our communities. and it does so through the prism three texas cities, austin, houston and dallas so please help me welcome our author megan kimple. thank you, gilbert. thank you all for being here. it's really a delight now, megan, you as you point out the book, you were born in austin, you grew up in southern california, and california. and that that area particularly in california, like texas, has a

very strong car geographically, big, very spread out. was it during that time period growing up in southern california that if you first started to question the role that urban highways have in or our society, it wasn't really growing up, but i moved back l.a. after college and i was trying to work as a journalist. so i was an editorial assistant at the los angeles times. i made minimum wage and i was tutoring high school students to like pay rent. and so as a result, i was driving all over los angeles and. it's this was the era before smartphones. so i had this like printout of, you know, mapquest and passenger seat. i would like, obsessively check. siegler econ if anybody remembers that. before i left house to to kind of navigate where i was going. and i often spent three or 4 hours a day in the car. and that's you know, i the impact on my quality of life was enormous. and that's when i really started to kind of wonder like, why, why is this? why we built cities this way?

what does this do to us, you know, as drivers, as people, a community and i moved to tucson, arizona, to go to graduate school. and that difference of quality, of life, of moving somewhere. i relied on my car to get everywhere i needed to go to somewhere where i could bike and walk most places was so, so significant that like that is certainly what triggered this interest. i think many of us tend to see highway construction as, a response to demand. we are the populations of our cities that are growing. we've got more more cars, more wanting to drive, and we're just trying to keep up with that. but your book explores the idea, and it's an idea that's been about for a while that widening our highways, expanding our highways really the effect of inducing demand. and i was wonder if you could talk a little bit about the concept of induced demand and how it works. and i think that, as you describe it, people in texas particularly will it'll sound familiar to them. so the phenomenon of demand has been well understood since 1960s when we started building these

highways to begin with. and the basic principle is when you add car capacity, cars will fill that up. it's basic supply and demand. when you make a good, cheaper and for people to access more people will access it. so they will move farther from their. jobs. they will move farther from their schools. they might take more discretionary trips to the grocery store or the mall, more often than they otherwise would have. and that was first documented in 1962. and it has been documented again, again saying that when add lane miles cars thought those lane miles. researchers at the university of california davis found that when you add 1% of lane miles, 1% more traffic results and, that is controlling for population growth, that has nothing to do with like more people driving. it's just people drive more per capita driving increases. so, again, this has been documented again. again, some people call it the fundamental law of road congestion and. yet we have a department of transportation, the texas department of transportation known as texting, who comes to every major city in the state and says, hey, we're going to

fix traffic by widening this highway. all the evidence shows that doesn't fix traffic. and so a lot of that kind of catalyst for my book was learning about a highway expansion in austin where i live, i-35, which runs right through the middle of the city, just as it does here learning that intended to expand that from 12 to 20 lanes, promising to fix congestion and adding lanes would not fix congestion. and so i thought, why are we still doing this is the literal definition of insanity. yeah. and i think i should out that while you're looking primarily at texas, i mean, texas is probably an extreme example of the phenomenon that you're describing this is this is a national issue. i mean, this is big cities throughout the country with this. yeah, the book takes place in texas. but it is very much like kind of pitched the book as texas is the worst offender of something that everyone everywhere doing every state in the country democrat republican led. it doesn't matter every major city they have a massive highway expansion in the works. so biden's infrastructure bill

you know dedicated something like half $1,000,000,000,000 to road what roadways. and a recent study found that about a quarter of that funding is going to highway expansion. so, you know, hundreds of, billions of dollars across the country are laying down more pavement for promising to fix. and like all the evidence shows that won't. i think one of the things that's underappreciated, i think you really emphasize this in the book and i think really i be very important for everyone to be able to to to read and understand stories is the fact that these highways are, again, not only dealing demand and trying to deal with traffic issues cities, but they're shaping our cities. you know, they're not this is always responding sprawl in many cases. if you look historically they have led to sprawl. they've contributed to sprawl and they have it which you talk about with houston and austin they contributed segregating the

city and. i think if you would talk a little bit about i-10, how i-10 cut through fifth ward in houston and the impact that that had on and on the community there. yeah. i mean it's a kind of an adage that development follows roads roads don't development roads open up new land for development. and we have seen that in almost every city in texas. but when these highways were first built in the 1950s and sixties. so the interstate highway passed in 1956 under president eisenhower. lots federal money became available to build highways and urban planners and cities across the country saw this opportunity not only kind of accommodate all the demand for cars also get rid of quote unquote blighted neighborhoods. those neighborhoods that had been made blighted by the federal government a decade earlier through redlining, which is the practice of systemically denying access to credit to neighborhoods simply because black and hispanic lived in those neighborhoods. so a decade later, as were drawing these interstate routes,

they to these neighborhoods, which there were lower property that people there had did not have the political capital to resist highway construction. and i came across a study that a modern day study found that red line neighborhoods, again, like neighborhoods that were denied access to credit just because they had minority populations in them were three times more likely to have an interstate highway routed through them than the best rated neighborhoods. it's you can see it again and again in the historical documentation. i spent a lot of time in library archives. i went to the national archives in washington, d.c. to look at the bureau public roads, which is the predecessor of the federal highway administration. it's written in the record that these highways were an opportunity to of clean up, quote unquote, putting that big air quotes blighted neighborhoods. this coincided with the era of urban, which is a like a very acknowledged policy by the federal government to to demolish black and hispanic communities and the kind of the engine driving all of that was the creation of the suburbs. we, through our federal housing policy, incentivized white

homeowners to move far from city centers they could access, you know, really great government, more government backed. so these white families were kind of flocking out to the suburbs and to get them there we built these massive highways. and a great example is you mentioned interstate ten in the fifth ward and houston. the fifth ward was then and a black community in the 1950s. you know, i talk to people who grew up there who remember it in the 1950s and sixties. it was like complete community. people walked everywhere. they needed to go. most people didn't have cars. they didn't lock the doors on their houses. people just came and went, you know, it was like everyone knew everyone. so there was just really no reason to leave before integration. well, you know, one day people started hearing rumors about a highway that was going to come through their neighborhood. this is before the voting rights act passed this before the civil rights act passed. people, you know, got their mail one day and it said, hey, we need land for highway. we need your home for highway. and people had basically no way to resist or or do anything

except move. so i talked to this one woman. her name is honoree guidry. her family was in middle school when her family got that letter. the texas highway department needs your home. and so they move, you know, three miles north of where they had lived before. but she was determined to graduate from phillis wheatley high school, which is like one of the most prominent black high schools, houston. so she walked to school day three miles to school there through high school because her family had been displaced by that highway. you know, i talked lots of people like her, that highway just like plow through the community. it demolished more than 1200 structures, took three full city blocks, and it just like emptied out the community, people started leaving, you know, the neighborhood they knew gone, the their friends, people's friends were gone. people themselves like own area had been displaced. and so just like really like literally cut barrier through that community. and so it's like split in half now people call the southern half of the fifth ward the bottom because it's below the

freeway. it was an example of someone who was a cheerleader and was forced to go to the dedication just, kind of celebrate the dedication of something that had really decimated this neighborhood where she grew up. yeah. so i was looking for people who had been by the highways original construction. so i just started talking to the kind of like neighborhood leaders in the fifth ward, and i had barbecue one day with this woman, jane, who was telling me about the highway's construction, and she happened to be like a majorette in the marching band at phillis wheatley high school. and so as part of that, you know, all these highways were big celebration. so there was a ribbon cutting when this highway opened. and the phillis wheatley high school marching band performed. and so she marched down that highway. you know, it's it's totally clean. no cars have ever been on it, and it's supposed to be this big celebration, right? like progress has come to the fifth ward and she's, like, this wasn't progress. like my neighborhood has been demolished like i'm not celebrating yet. i'm a teenager. i can't. what can i except like trauma button on this highway go about my life and so like even at the

time, i think, you know, a lot of people were really troubled by the creation of these highways. and in cities across the country, people revolted like there was a mass movement of against highway construction. the original freeway revolts in the the 1960s. you know, tens of thousands of people protested in golden gate park, san francisco, in washington, d.c., you know, black and white people together, multiracial coalition of people protested highway construction. and a lot of these people effectively stopped highways like freeway fighters in the sixties, erased highway lines from maps before they could be built. you talked about the 1956 interstate highway act signed into by president eisenhower. and one of the many things i learned in this book that both president eisenhower and i think his chief advisor kind of helping to implement this this law, they were kind of appalled at the way this was being implemented in the various states in the country. their for this was this is going to be something that's going to

connect all the states of the country. they did not see it as this is going to be by states to deal with traffic congestion. and the idea of routing these highways through cities. this was not something that they envision right? no. i'm like, i love this story. i mean, i don't love it. it makes me angry. but like, i loved finding as a reporter because it really kind of cracked the book open for me. so i went to the eisenhower presidential library, which is in beautiful abilene, kansas, and to try to find out like what was kind of narrative around the creation of the interstate system and indeed, you know, it's called the national highway national defense highway act. so sold it to congress as means to connect the country in case of nuclear attack, in case of war. let's move goods and produce and, you know, economic across the country while at the same time the of this interstate, the interstate act passed was a $25 billion law. the biggest public works project ever attempted in american history.

and the federal government agreed pay 90% of the cost of construction of these highways. meanwhile cities like san antonio and dallas and you know, people were buying cars were so many more cars on, city streets, car car registrations jumped from like hundred thousand to 25 million in a couple of decades. so city planners like, oh, my gosh, we have to do something to accommodate all these cars. and so had this tons of money coming in from the federal government and basically no strings attached. so they started doing what i just described, houston's fifth ward. they started building massive interstate highways right through the middle of cities to solve this kind of newly created problem of urban congestion. so the interstate highway act passes within a few years. it's running wildly over budget $11 billion over its $25 billion budget. and eisenhower appoints general john bragdon to look into the program. how is it being implemented? he wanted a report back on like what's happening with the implementation of the interstate highway program. so this guy bragged, looks into

it and he realizes that the program is running wildly overbudget, largely because of urban route. that's much more expensive. build a highway in the middle of a city than it is out in farmland. and so he congress, hey, when you pass act did you intend for states to build highways through the middle of cities. the department of commerce goes and looks into it. they produce report and bragdon basically synthesizes all of this in a report that he he gives to eisenhower and actually that like a notecards of the presentation he gave to eisenhower. they've got cursive writing on them. you know, his his notes to himself. and the short answer is congress not intend for highways be built through the middle of cities when they passed the interstate highway system, the interstate highway act. it was not intended to solve urban congestion. and bragdon gives this really remarkable speech to eisenhower and a group assembled, you know, high ups in the government saying. basically, all of the experts, the way to solve urban congestion is by building transit systems. and yet across the country, what cities are doing are actively

out transit to build. you know, this guy is a republican he's an engineer. this is not a political conversation. this is pure geometry, like people take out more space than cars do. like all of us in our cars would not be able to fit in this room. but here we are. and so he gives this presentation to eisenhower and others to say, you should tell the bureau of public roads to instruct states to stop using our money, federal money, which was designated to connect the country to, solve this new problem of urban congestion. so he gives this very compelling presentation. and like eisenhower's response to that is captured in like a memorandum written few days after the meeting. and he was really -- that his program being used in a way that he had not requested. so he responds, apparently in frustration, that the manner of running interstate routes through cities was against his wishes and those who had implemented it that way had done so against his desire. so so i found that i was like, it wasn't supposed be this way. this was not the intent of the

program. this was never what was supposed to happen. but like, okay, well, why they change anything? well, i think i found, like, eisenhower as secretary as daily notes in the archives. and she has this note that. you know, these guys were in for a meeting on the interstate highway program. bragdon thinks that cities should directed to to not build highways through the middle of their cities, but like general parsons and others think would be murder to move in an election year. so it's an election state. money has been allocated to states. eisenhower, is this like the states would rise up in arms if. we took away this money. the states electoral votes. the states have electoral votes. he wants, you know, his party to win reelection. and so is done. well, you know, we've talked about sprawl. we talked about displacement and how communities have been affected. businesses affected housing by what you're