Southern Methodist University (SMU) graduate student Collin Yarbrough has used Dallas’ Central Expressway all his life. But it wasn’t until an assignment for his engineering class that he began to see the road in a new light.
The assignment, which was for a course on context and impact of design, involved writing a paper on a design element in Dallas, with the expressway as one option.
“It’s a highway I’ve used my entire life,” Yarbrough said, noting that it runs right past SMU. “So I thought it might be interesting, thinking maybe there’s something cool about the way it looks and the way it’s designed.”
But as he began researching, he found the road had a much darker history than he could have anticipated.
It began when Yarbrough stumbled upon a New York Times article that explained decisions made during the 1990s expansion of the highway. In order to make space for the expansion, the construction project dug up 1,127 bodies of people who were formerly enslaved and buried in the Freedman’s Cemetery.
“There’s just something so fundamentally unjust about the fact that we would prioritize the expansion of the highway over the eternal rest of 1,100 Black bodies,” said Yarbrough. “And I just couldn’t let that go.”
As he continued researching, he realized the Central Expressway wasn’t an isolated incident. He discovered other examples “where communities of color were either cut through the middle of, paved away, no longer existed or were walled off from other parts of the city and segregated further by construction.”
