the GREATEST decade ‘56-’66

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The  Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was a pivotal epoch in the intersecting trajectories of white supremacy, spatial injustice, the normalization of militaristic life, the mythology of the middle class, and the greatest expansion of capitalism on the cultural fabric of the United States. While heralded as a necessary progression to “meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range," the socio-economic interests of the ruling white elite had shifted itself from the cosmopolitan, urban livelihood, to larger space, larger homes, the automobile, and the reality of the accessibility of this lifestyle to the middle class. As much of the country was attempting to move outward, spreading greater environmental degradation and dependence on individually owned vehicles (i.e., greater use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions), Black communities were being forced to stay in urban areas that were suffering from the escape of whiteness and therefore, the material access to a safe and healthy life. Discriminatory housing policies, such as redlining, and the construction of interstates through mostly Black neighborhoods cumulatively led to many of the ills of the city in the 1980s and 1990s, under the isolationist and structurally violent neoliberal policies.

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The East coast panel are the images of the nuclear family and the vision of the middle class that begun in the late 1950s, and on the West coast panel are the images of Black life and urban resistance of the dilapidating cityscapes that began to see some of the largest mass mobilizations of civil disobedience/revolutionary inertia in American history. The disjointed presentation of these panels out of order is to further cement the disillusionment of public memory of the “Greatest