“Somebody Else’s Fight”: Local Dynamics in the Baltimore Highway Revolt

Abstract

This article revisits the Baltimore “highway revolt” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike previous scholarship, which has primarily focused on the citywide, interracial antihighway coalition Movement Against Destruction, this article examines local and grassroots antihighway groups in the white ethnic neighborhoods of Southeast and South Baltimore. A more localized investigation complicates the narrative of the “harmonious” convergence of different classes and races around the highway issue—the notion that “the people” came together to block “the road.” Local antihighway organizing was more parochial and more divisive, mirroring the factionalized racial and environmental landscape of early 1970s urban America. This finding has implications for historians’ understanding of highway revolts in other American cities—several of which have also been characterized as examples of effective coalition building between different neighborhoods, social classes, ethnicities, and races.