The following article summarizes the original event which is listed below the summary.
Mapping Prejudice
How can you see prejudice on a map of a city? Geographers, historians, and thousands of citizen volunteers are making it possible to visualize the hidden history of race and privilege in the Twin Cities landscapes that we love and travel through each day.
The Mapping Prejudice Project, based in the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota, is mapping racial covenants in the Twin Cities. Racial covenants are short clauses of text embedded into property deeds that barred non-whites from buying or occupying a parcel of land. Although these clauses were made illegal by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, their legacy continues today in the Twin Cities, which has some of the largest racial disparities in the country.
UMRA A.M. | Mapping prejudice
Tue, October 13 2020, 9am
Event to be held via Zoom.
How can you see prejudice on a map of a city? Answer: When dedicated scholars illuminate what was built into the most fundamental planning decisions of who got to live where. Geographers, historians, and thousands of citizen volunteers are making it possible to visualize this previously hidden history of race and privilege in the landscapes that we love and travel through each day.
You are invited to join Kirsten Delegard, director and co-founder of the Mapping Prejudice Project, for an eye-opening UMRA A.M. at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, October 13, via Zoom. Delegard will be introduced by UMRA member and former Dean of Libraries Wendy Pradt Lougee.
The Mapping Prejudice Project, based in the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota, is mapping racial covenants in the Twin Cities. Racial covenants are clauses—a couple lines of text—that were embedded into property deeds to bar people who were not white from buying or even occupying parcels of land to which the covenants were attached.
Illuminating structural racism
Covenants were made illegal by the 1968 Fair Housing Act. But their legacy continues today in the Twin Cities, which has some of the largest racial disparities in the country. The Mapping Prejudice Project is designed to reveal, in the words of American author and historian Ibram Kendi, the “racism behind these racial disparities.” It illuminates how structural racism shaped the urban landscape, blocking African Americans from critical avenues for housing stability and the accumulation of wealth.
Delegard is a third-generation Minneapolitan and public historian. To explore the complex history of her hometown, she established Mapping Prejudice as well as The Historyapolis Project. A graduate of the Minneapolis Public Schools and Wesleyan University, she holds a PhD in history from Duke University, where she spent her graduate school years exploring American social movements, comparative women’s history, and the history of women and politics in the United States.
In addition to her appointment in the University of Minnesota Libraries, she has a faculty affiliation with the Department of Geography, Environment & Society and the Heritage Studies and Public History Program in the College of Design.
Please register and join us for UMRA A.M. on October 13.
—Jan Morlock, UMRA president-elect and Program Committee chair
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