Happy Highway Birthday

Highlighting the 50th anniversary of the interstate highway system, Newsweek interviews Charles Nemmers, who worked at the Federal Highway Administration for 32 years. Here's one interesting thing he says about the development of the system:

The interstate, in terms of civil rights, was one of the first programs in the United States that required a lot of things we take for granted today, and this was pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964. It required that there were no separate facilities for blacks and whites when they worked on construction projects and that there had to be access to all members of the crews that were building the interstate system. These are things that we now take for granted, but back then the interstate system was ahead of where the United States government was and where most of the culture was in terms of opening up the program to all members of society.