Durham Freeway signs stand near Fayetteville Street in East Durham. Photo by Isabelle Abadie.
More than 50 years after Highway 147 ripped through Durham’s more prosperous Black community, city leaders are exploring ways to repair the damage
By: Chandler Cates, Nico Jordan & Julian Reynolds
Anyone who lives in Durham has used Highway 147 to get downtown, go to Bulls games and get to the airport.
But 147’s history is about much more than getting across town.
Long before it carried commuters, the land now occupied by the “Durham Freeway” held one of the most economically powerful communities in the South. And now, over 50 years later, Durham’s transportation department is exploring not just how it reshaped the city, but also what Durham might have looked like today if it had never been built.
As part of the Reimagine Durham Freeway study, almost 800 residents completed a survey about Highway 147’s past and how it meets the community’s present and future needs.
The study has come up with three options based on the residents’ survey responses. Option one would fully replace the freeway with a boulevard for public use, option two involves upgrading the freeway and adding more bridges and caps above the freeway for the community to pass over, and option three would upgrade the freeways infrastructure to help improve safety and decrease traffic.
The question now being asked by city leaders, historians, and residents is not only how that highway reshaped Durham, but what Durham might have looked like today if it had never been built.
“I don’t want to wait years to restore and repair the Hayti community or reconnecting our communities in general,” Mayor Leo Williams said during August 2025 city council meeting. “I think we have an amazing opportunity here, and I want us to think big.”
In the early 20th century, Durham earned national recognition for Black entrepreneurship. Along Parrish Street, a four-block corridor north of the Hayti neighborhood, Black-owned businesses flourished. Institutions like North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NCML) and Mechanics and Farmers Bank financed homes, supported local businesses, and helped create what became known as “Black Wall Street.”
Just south of Parrish Street, Hayti developed as the center of black life in Durham. The neighborhood was home to churches, schools, hospitals, entertainment venues, various stores and countless living spaces, creating a self-sufficient community during a time of legal segregation. Historians often described Hayti as the “the Mecca of Black capitalism.”
People relax in front of damaged restaurant on Pettigrew Street in 1977. Photo courtesy of Durham County Library. 
Hayti residents march in protest of urban renewal in 1967. Photo courtesy of Durham County Library. 
The largest Black-owned insurance company in the world was located on Parrish Street in 1930. Photo courtesy of Durham County Library.
According to a 2013 documentary titled The Lessons of Hayti, NCML alone helped finance roughly 90% of black-owned homes in Durham and supported more than 100 Black businesses. This economic strength helped Durham avoid some of the violent racial conflicts that devastated Black communities in other southern cities during the early 1900s.
But as urban renewal policies and the expansion of the interstate highway system began in the mid-20th century, the stability they’d created began to erode.
Across the United States, highways were frequently routed through Black neighborhoods, displacing residents and dismantling long-standing communities. In 1968, Durham followed that pattern.
Construction of what is now Highway 147 cut directly through Hayti and surrounding neighborhoods.
According to The Lessons of Hayti, more than 700 buildings were demolished, and hundreds of families were displaced. Homes, businesses, and community institutions that had taken decades to build were destroyed in the name of progress and transportation.
Justin Laidlaw, a staff reporter at Indy Week who graduated from Riverside in 2008 and has lived in Durham his entire life, said the effects of the freeway were immediate and long-lasting.
“The building of 147 really cut through and disrupted, and I think some would say destroyed the ability for the black community in Durham, particularly in Hayti and surrounding neighborhoods, to sustain that level of economic activity,” Laidlaw said.
Laidlaw published an article in November about Fayette Place, a former public housing development made in Hayti to help replace the homes destroyed during the construction of Highway 147. The homes helped at first, but overtime, the properties started to deteriorate. “With only the original foundations left on the property, [it’s] a relic to housing dreams deferred,” Laidlaw said.
While the construction of Highway147 was not unique to Durham, Laidlaw noted that it followed a national trend that prioritized transportation over the preservation of already existing communities.
“Unfortunately, that type of construction was not unique to Durham,” Laidlaw said.
Kevin Allen is a Durham native and administrator at North Carolina Central University whose daughter, Sadie, graduated from Riverside in 2024. He remembers Hayti as a connected Black community before Highway 147 divided it.
“Prior to the highway, you could walk for several miles in the Black community,” Allen said. “There were houses, churches, corner stores and schools. People on every economic level lived near each other.”
Allen, who grew up in Hayti and wrote a book about it titled Looking Back to Move Forward, said that proximity to Black professionals shaped how young people in the neighborhood viewed their future.
“I could walk a couple blocks and be standing in front of the home of a Black doctor or lawyer, which gave you hope that one day, maybe you could be a doctor or a lawyer or teacher.”
The construction of 147, Allen said, broke that sense of connection.
“Imagine you live in a neighborhood and all of a sudden, someone builds a deep, long hole in the middle that separated you from your friends on the other side,” he said. “That’s what 147 was for the Black community.”
Through the Reimagine Durham Freeway study, officials are weighing how to reshape the area that now cuts through the heart of Hayti.
While Allen said Hayti can never be fully restored, he believes future decisions should acknowledge what was lost.
“The city should always be mindful of recognizing Hayti’s contribution to Durham,” he said.
