How Long Memories Killed the Biggest Road Project in State History

On a sticky evening just after Memorial Day, Darnell Ivory paid a visit to her childhood friend Audwin Ross on his front porch in McCrorey Heights, a historic Black neighborhood in Charlotte.

Ross rarely uses the porch because of the dust and nonstop traffic noise from the Brookshire Freeway, about 100 feet away on the other side of a chain-link fence and a steep, wooded berm. But he’s renovating the house, which he’s lived in for all of his 68 years. On this day, it was a mess inside and even hotter. Better to sit outside, even with the rush-hour procession of vehicles headed northwest on Brookshire. A few hundred yards east, Brookshire intersects another freeway, one of the state’s busiest and most congested: Interstate 77.

A light rain fell. The road noise underscored the two old friends’ conversation and, at times, threatened to drown it out. “A lot of times, it’s like a parking lot,” Ross said as he gazed at the highway. 

Both recalled when the state built the highways. Ivory and her family were forced to leave—even though, at 74, she lives only a mile away. Ross and his family stayed, and he remains, living alone. His reward for that tenure is noise and dirt—and a well-earned reputation as the neighborhood’s unofficial historian. He can remember who lived in which of McCrorey Heights’ brick bungalows and ranches and, going back decades, when.

Why stay on a street right next to one highway and a stone’s throw from another? “A little bit of everything: my neighbors, the convenience, the history behind it, the uniqueness of it,” Ross said. “This is home.”

Home has always felt like something the state might snatch away. Along with its counterparts around the country, and especially in the South, North Carolina’s largest city has a long history of seizing homes in Black neighborhoods to clear paths for highways and space for government buildings. In the 1950s and ’60s, city and state officials said doing so was necessary for Charlotte to develop into North Carolina’s economic dynamo.

But residents of McCrorey Heights and other historically Black neighborhoods on Charlotte’s west side—Wilmore, Clanton Park, even gentrifying Wesley Heights—have long memories, and children and allies who inherited them. They remember the communities the highways split apart, like McCrorey Heights and Biddleville, which the Brookshire Freeway cut off from each other in the early ’70s. They remember the disintegration of a thriving community of Black professionals who used to be their neighbors.

So in 2024, when the N.C. Department of Transportation won approval to add toll lanes along an 11-mile stretch of I-77 through and past many of the same neighborhoods, it felt like exhuming an agonizing past.

DOT says I-77 South, from Brookshire down to the South Carolina line, has the worst interstate congestion in the state. More than 160,000 vehicles use it every day, a number expected to exceed 200,000 by 2050. The freeway was last widened in the mid-1990s, when Charlotte’s population was about half what it is now. The estimated cost of the new proposal was $3.2 billion, a record for a North Carolina highway project.

The city’s business leaders, usually Charlotte’s pacesetters, expressed ardent support, saying the project was needed for continued growth. DOT promised that the design and land acquisition process would look nothing like the steamroller displacement of decades past. They said the state would force a minimal number of residents to move and add bicycle and pedestrian connectors and other neighborhood improvements. This time around, they said, they would listen.

None of it worked. The project is dead. What until recently seemed like a foregone conclusion collapsed over two weeks in May, when the regional transportation board that had approved the project’s public-private funding model in 2024 stunningly reversed course and rescinded its support. DOT withdrew the $600 million in state highway funds it had allocated for the project and another $100 million provided to regions that approve toll lanes. As of this writing, no one knew when or how improvements may now come to I-77 South.

That might mean continued congestion for years. But building the new lanes would take years, too, the two old friends said on the porch. That’d be even worse. Ivory nodded toward the scene in front of her, a tangle of traffic in the rain.

“If you can’t fix this,” she said, “then how in the world are we going to trust you on something else?”

Disruptive Highways

Federal legislation created the interstate system in 1956. The government began to build multilane, limited-access highways that linked cities—and, often, built them through and even within city centers as affluent, mostly white people left for the booming suburbs.

By the ’70s, interstates and highways ran through many of North Carolina’s cities, usually on land where Black people owned homes and businesses. The Durham Freeway (N.C. 147) displaced thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses in the Hayti District, while the reconfiguration of Wade Avenue in Raleigh cut the historic Black community of Oberlin Village in two.

But nowhere was the building as widespread and disruptive as in Charlotte. The city was one of the first in the country to take advantage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, which led to the first of a series of highways through and near the city center: Independence Boulevard, finished in 1949. (Independence wasn’t a limited-access expressway, although part of it was later turned into one.)

The project touched off an exodus of Black homeowners and residents into neighborhoods on the west side. The displacement culminated with the razing of the Brooklyn community under what was called “urban renewal” in the late 1960s and early ’70s; an inner loop that surrounded the city center, Interstate 277, was built in stages from 1970 to 1988.

Interstate 85 opened on the city’s outskirts in 1958. By 1960, planners envisioned a system of Charlotte expressways “capable not only of satisfying immediate and long-range traffic needs, but also of actually stimulating the area’s overall development,” according to a “Master Highway Transportation Plan” prepared for the city and state that year. The plan recommended linking Independence and I-85 to “North-South” and “Northwest” expressways within the city.

Both were completed by 1975. The latter became Brookshire Freeway, a stretch of N.C. 16. The former became I-77.

The recent toll lanes project would have affected homes, streets, and parks in the historically Black neighborhoods along the route. It was too early this spring to tell exactly what the impact would be for which neighborhoods, even after DOT released a pair of preliminary plans with maps. DOT emphasized that the project’s design was no more than 15% done and that private contractors’ bids, which the department expected to request in June, would begin to spell out the details.

But some displacement and upheaval was guaranteed. Anthony Foxx grew up in Lincoln Heights in the 1980s, near the interchange of I-77 and I-85 just north of McCrorey Heights. Foxx would become mayor of Charlotte and U.S. Secretary of Transportation for President Barack Obama—a position he used to highlight how federal highway construction had harmed Black and low-income neighborhoods.

The current I-77 debate is “a very familiar dance,” Foxx told The Assembly, “and it has its roots in the 1950s and ’60s.” He said the intensity of community opposition to the latest project didn’t surprise him.

“Many of the people who were in their prime working years at that time have passed on, but the communities are largely still there,” said Foxx, now director of Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government. “People are saying they want something different out of their highway system in these tightly populated urban centers.”

‘I Cried All Night’

Ivory spent five years in McCrorey Heights, in a house her mother, Emily, hired a contractor to build on a small corner lot after her father died in 1961. Emily Ivory wanted to live near her mother and sister instead of in Rock Hill, South Carolina, 30 miles south.

“She needed a village,” said Darnell Ivory, the youngest of three children. “She needed help with raising us because she never had to work before. My dad was the provider.”

They didn’t have much of a yard. Darnell and her two older brothers roamed the neighborhood and played baseball, basketball, and horseshoes. When it snowed, they’d sled down a hill where Brookshire is now. “We could go anywhere in the neighborhood,” she said, “and know that we were safe.”

It was a prized location in Charlotte’s Black community. McCrorey Heights is named after the Rev. H.L. McCrorey, who founded the neighborhood in 1912; McCrorey was president of Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte’s historic Black college, founded in 1867. (The university is in Biddleville, the neighborhood on the other side of Brookshire.) By the late ’50s, it was “a premier neighborhood for Charlotte’s highly educated African American elite,” wrote local historian Tom Hanchett. The Ivorys were proud to own a home there.

That ended with a letter from a right-of-way agent with the State Highway Commission. Darnell still keeps it in her folder, and she donated a copy to the James B. Duke Memorial Library at Johnson C. Smith. Dated December 28, 1966, the letter asserts that the state needed the property, which was in the path of a planned highway.

“[T]he Commission is very much interested in seeing that property owners are treated fairly,” wrote agent S.R. Pollard, “while, at the same time, ensuring that public funds are spent wisely.” Next to the letter in her folder is a 1968 Charlotte Observer article that quotes her mother talking about her reaction to the letter: “I cried all night.”

In 1967, Emily Ivory arranged to have the house placed on a trailer and driven to the Hyde Park neighborhood, about 12 miles north. The move worked out for the family: The lot was larger, and Emily added a bathroom and expanded the living room before she remarried and moved to California in the mid-’70s. (She died in 2008.) The house remains in the family. But the forced move—the sense that the family had no choice—still stings.

“She didn’t need to hear that news after she had lost a husband, moved, and then had these kids to take care of,” Darnell Ivory said. “One house matters.”

She pointed out where the house used to be, near the shoulder of the off-ramp from southbound I-77 onto Brookshire. A sign hangs from the chain-link fence: “STATE OWNED PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. N.C.D.O.T.”

Shouted Down

Widespread public opposition to the toll project surfaced only this year, from a growing coalition of community and political groups, residents, and public officials. An early indication was a February town hall meeting held by Charlotte City Council member and former state Sen. Malcolm Graham in a prominent westside Black church. Graham ended the meeting early after a crowd shouted down DOT representatives in protest.

That backlash had been building. DOT held community information sessions about the I-77 project throughout 2025, including two in November that Graham said he attended. Those drew few people, in part because a federal sweep of immigrant neighborhoods was dominating local news coverage.

Graham told The Assembly that he thought DOT’s presentations in November were overly technical and that its representatives didn’t seem concerned enough about how a highway project might trigger bad memories for residents. That’s why he devoted his town hall meeting to the project and invited Hanchett, the historian, to provide an overview of the history of highway construction in Charlotte.

By then, word about the project had begun to spread on social media, and local activist groups were coalescing around the project as an organizing tool; for example, PSL Charlotte, a socialist organization, had urged members and followers to pack Graham’s town hall meeting, and they showed up in force.

“When I saw the plans, and I saw how it was being presented, I knew that we had a problem. They were talking at the community versus talking to them,” Graham said in May. “I told them there was no way in hell that you can do a project or do anything on 77 without acknowledging the history of how that highway was built in the first place.”

The history of I-77 and Black communities wasn’t the only factor in the opposition. Residents questioned how effective toll lanes are at reducing congestion and noted that some of the private companies that would implement tolls aren’t even based in the U.S. Many Black and low-income residents resented last year’s narrow passage of a sales tax increase in Mecklenburg County to pay for transit projects.

Even state Transportation Secretary Daniel Johnson has said that DOT could have handled community engagement better. Johnson’s admission came despite the state’s unusually robust efforts to communicate with residents after the disastrous town hall meeting. In March, the department hired a Black-owned consulting firm that organized more public meetings and information sessions and staffed a “community engagement center,” open during work hours on weekdays, near the interstate.

But the history of highway construction in Charlotte undergirded all of it. Ross and Ivory, along with many other opponents The Assembly spoke with, returned to a hard line: Nothing the DOT did to reassure residents would have overridden a lifetime of distrust, and the department’s public relations efforts struck them as insulting, belated attempts to pacify them.

“There’s a kind of a systemic process in which the city or the state has intentionally tried to devalue and undermine this community,” said Sean Langley, president of the McCrorey Heights Neighborhood Association. “They’re used to going into neighborhoods and telling people what they’re going to do—and then they just do it.”

DOT’s insistence on toll lanes as the only option for the project angered residents, too. The department committed to them on I-77 South and two other Charlotte-area highways—neither have begun—in a long-range plan approved by the state Board of Transportation in 2014. The department said the cost of the I-77 project made it impossible to fund solely with state highway money. So DOT proposed to use $600 million in state money and allow a private infrastructure consortium to pay for the rest, then recoup their investment over 50 or more years through toll collections.

The state applied a similar arrangement to the I-77 North project that extends 26 miles from Charlotte to Mooresville. Despite ferocious opposition from residents, the toll lanes opened in 2019. But residents and area public officials have said repeatedly that the lanes reduce congestion only for people willing or able to pay exorbitant tolls to use them—$25 to $30, or higher, for a one-way trip at peak traffic times.

The local environmental group Sustain Charlotte invited architects and planners to submit alternate designs and presented several in May; they resembled similar reconfigurations of interstates in cities like Syracuse, New York, and San Francisco. Others pointed out that DOT plans to widen 10 miles of I-85 in Gaston County without toll lanes. (The department will cover the cost by breaking the project into three segments, which allows it to work within the mandated $600 million cap on individual highway projects.) But DOT has never proposed anything but toll lanes for I-77 South.

The opposition deepened and spread throughout the spring. The influential Black Political Caucus of Charlotte-Mecklenburg sued to delay the project and made no secret of its opposition—a key factor considering that seven of the Charlotte City Council’s 11 members are Black.

Finally, on May 11, the City Council, which had voted unanimously for the project in 2024, voted 6-5 to rescind its support. (Graham, saying he was concerned about how the withdrawal would affect future highway projects in a growing city, tentatively cast the deciding vote.) The issue then went to the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization (CRTPO), the governing body that plans and determines local support for proposed highway projects; the I-77 South project needed the regional organization’s approval of the funding model to proceed. DOT had won that approval on a split vote in October 2024.

On May 20, I-77 wasn’t on the regional board’s agenda. It needed a supermajority to add the item to the agenda and another to rescind its support for the project. It achieved both.

DOT’s response was terse: “As we have discussed with City Council and CRTPO delegates, this vote means the loss of $700M in critical transportation funding designed to address congestion, crash rates and community-driven priorities for the Charlotte region.”  The department canceled its contract with the consulting firm and closed the community engagement center.

Business leaders and local Republicans began to speculate about how the GOP-controlled General Assembly might use the I-77 South vote as license to curtail state funding for Charlotte-area projects and try to restrict the city’s power. The legislature has done so before, as in the HB2 controversy a decade ago. 

Key figures in the opposition—like McCrorey Heights’ Langley and Robert Dawkins of the community advocacy organization Action NC—told The Assembly that they were willing to take that chance. If the General Assembly wants to punish Charlotte, Dawkins said, “Then do it. And keep traffic backed up.”

To people who live near it, the interstate represents more than a conduit for the region’s economic growth, Langley said: “It’s a detriment to our quality of life. It’s a physical and psychological barrier that lets us know that, hey, these neighborhoods over here are expendable.”

‘It Backfired on Them’

The vote to reject the toll lanes will have an unavoidable consequence: It almost certainly means many years of inaction as traffic worsens on I-77 South.

Any solution will require “a lot of people thinking through how to make that happen, and a lot of willingness on those people to be creative and open to different ways of doing it,” Foxx said. He mentioned a hypothetical, suggested in a Sustain Charlotte rendering and similar to proposals in other cities: all or part of I-77 South routed through tunnels and “capped” for green space and other uses above.

Could the state achieve that kind of solution, and when, and for how much? No one knows, including Foxx. “Crisis forces us either to walk away from each other,” he said, “or to think in novel ways about how to solve a problem.”

For her part, Darnell Ivory missed the planning organization’s vote. The retired teacher and school administrator was vacationing in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. “I had a grand time,” she said. She put her phone on airplane mode and tried not to think about anything in Charlotte.

When she returned, she found out from television news that the I-77 project was dead. Overjoyed, she began to call friends and neighbors. “You know what I said? ‘When the people came together like that, it made a difference,’” Ivory said. “Their voices were heard, and that meant a lot to me.” 

The thought crossed her mind that her mother would be happy, too. “I don’t think they thought all of this was going to happen the way it happened,” Ivory said. “It backfired on them tremendously.”

Her friend Ross, a few feet away, nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “They didn’t do their research. They weren’t even familiar with the area. … You’re breaking up families, communities, culture. You’re going to turn it into something that’s unrecognizable later on, and once they start, they’re going to keep on going.”

Soon after, their visit concluded, and Ivory left for home. Brookshire traffic continued to sweep past as the rain fell. Ivory held an umbrella as she walked to her pickup truck at the curb. On the way, she turned back to Ross and told him how nice it was to catch up. She said the conversation had reminded her of people and places she hadn’t thought about in a long time.