A Child’s Bicycling Death Haunts a Durham Neighborhood; 35 Years On, Not Much Has Changed

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Good morning, readers.

Thirty-five years ago, 6-year-old John Parker was killed by a pickup truck on Cheek Road. John, the second-youngest of six children, was riding his bike with his siblings before school.

And, to this day, there are no sidewalks on Cheek Road near Merrick-Moore Elementary school in East Durham, where students still walk to school on a road with sloping shoulders and an often-ignored speed limit. 

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been progress across the city—Durham recently hired a Vision Zero coordinator, and federal investment is bringing sidewalks to areas like the Holloway Street Transit corridor—but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In the 1940s, Black military veterans returning from World War II helped establish the Merrick-Moore neighborhood. Since then, residents say they have endured everything from noisy industrial trucks and speeding cars to illegal tire dumping and air pollution that threaten their health and safety.

Pedestrian deaths are highest in formerly redlined areas, neighborhoods where Black people lived because of discriminatory federal mortgage lending practices. The lack of sidewalks, damaged walkways, and roads with high speed limits are concentrated in these neighborhoods, creating a little-recognized public health crisis.

“People will talk about vulnerable communities as if there is a problem with these communities,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “when in fact it is our systems and policies that have created these failings.”

—Chase

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