Project: Mapping Prejudice
About the project
Mapping Prejudice began in 2016 as an experiment. The team wanted to see whether a new awareness of racial covenants could help people see what Ibram X. Kendi calls the “racism behind those racial disparities.” Over the course of several years, it drew on the tools of the digital humanities and tenets of public history to develop a methodology that mobilized community members to read racial covenants and transcribe the information necessary to locate racial restrictions on a digital map. It works with community members to create geospatial datasets that fuel new research and reparative policies. It turns these datasets into cartographic visualizations that spark new understandings and conversations about structural racism in Minnesota.
During 2022-23, Mapping Prejudice had the privilege of working with graduate and undergraduate interns from MN Transform who enriched the project’s capacity for community engagement around the history of exclusionary housing practices. Thanks to this funding, the project was able to grow in the critical areas of community engagement, digital outreach, and live event production.
Bridging the Faultiness
MN Transform intern Kelly Rogers worked with Mapping Prejudice Community Engagement Lead Rebecca Gillette to produce Bridging the Faultlines: two evenings that celebrated the launch of a new documentary series from Twin Cities Public Television, Jim Crow of the North Stories. The screenings–which took place at the historic Capri Theater in North Minneapolis and Breck School in Golden Valley–were interspersed with live performances from Black creatives who explored the impact of these racist housing policies in these neighboring communities. These two cities have been divided for decades by racial covenants embedded in property records that deliberately built racial segregation.
As a community engagement intern, Rogers supported Gillette in a wide array of pre-production tasks that ranged from asset creation such as flyers, programs, promotional materials and event signage to technical programming, working with partners from Twin Cities Public Television to embed captions in the short films and building run-of-show documents that detailed the programming from start to finish. She also coordinated and executed a multiplatform marketing campaign to promote the event. During the events, she acted as the technical lead responsible for running the program from the media booth with the help of three other members of the Mapping Prejudice and Golden Valley teams. The events were a wonderful success, with 318 attendees between both screenings.
Volunteer transcription sessions
MN Transform interns Kelly Rogers, Zuko Buechler, and Hannah Belyn worked with Community Engagement Lead Rebecca Gillette to facilitate weekly online training sessions for Mapping Prejudice volunteers. The team invites community members into the work of documenting racial covenants through volunteer transcription sessions, which train people who want to contribute to the dataset. Using the online platform Zooniverse, participants can attend one session and then sift through uploaded deeds on their own time. The flexibility of this process lends itself to a diverse range of volunteers from classrooms to church groups to stay-at-home parents and more.
Gillette trained Buechler to host these sessions, encouraging them to step into a leadership role that was community-facing. Buechler walked volunteers through the history of racial covenants, the process that allows the deeds to be transcribed, and facilitated discussion around what was learned as a result of the exercise. Since 2016, Mapping Prejudice has mobilized more than 8,000 people to transcribe the information necessary to put over 40,000 racial covenants on a map of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These sessions are designed to offer a critical space for community connection and conversations about the history of structural racism.
Digital Storytelling
After starting as a MN Transform intern, Kelly Rogers moved into a critical staff position with Mapping Prejudice. Rogers is now the project’s Communications Manager, which means that she is responsible for creating engaging, digestible digital storytelling across many platforms. She writes and produces the monthly newsletter, manages the social media accounts, and develops compelling visuals for team presentations. She has also worked to revamp the content of the project website, which serves as a portal for sharing maps, historical narratives, educator resources, and media pieces. Bringing these distillations directly to an expanding online audience has opened new opportunities for those interested in this work to engage, connect, and share with their peers. The creation of multimodal resources is a core tenet of public history and is essential to the mission of Mapping Prejudice.
Community conversations
MN Transform interns Kelly Rogers, Zuko Buechler, and Hannah Belyn worked with Community Engagement lead Rebecca Gillette to bring Mapping Prejudice into summer community centered events. Over the course of the semester, Gillette used her expertise to guide the team in developing materials to capture the attention of attendees and provide resources for them to get involved in the project. The table included samples of racially restrictive covenants, custom maps that reflected the specific geography of the event, and take-home packets that allowed participants to learn more on their own time. This was also an opportunity to bring this work directly to communities that were impacted by these practices.
Buechler and Belyn joined Gillette for these events, training their delivery of this history to cater to the understanding of the wide variety of visitors that stopped by during the day. Weaving Mapping Prejudice into community conversations brought a range of new insights and ideas on ways to make this history more accessible. It also inspired new collaborations with organizations that are difficult to reach from the library in which Mapping Prejudice is based. Without these events, it would be impossible to cultivate authentic relationships and community trust. Throughout the summer, the team connected with over 650 people. The events included various Open Streets locations, Juneteenth at Brooklyn Center, Urban League Family Day, and a Campus Exploration Fair for Welcome Week at the University of Minnesota.
“Lament for a lost intersection”: Uncovering the history of Sixth Avenue North
MN Transform interns Kelly Rogers and Zuko Buechler helped Project Director Kirsten Delegard recreate the visual and sonic landscape of Sixth Avenue North, the street that served as the cultural and commercial spine of the largest Black neighborhood in Minnesota in the 1920s and 1930s. Sixth Avenue North was wiped off the map in 1938, when construction began on Olson Memorial Highway, which was heralded as the first “super-highway” in Minnesota when it was completed in 1940. “Lament for a lost intersection” is a community “counter mapping” effort that seeks to reframe the historical narrative about what we lost to Urban Renewal in the Twin Cities through deep archival research.
Mapping Prejudice combined an array of primary sources to act as a time machine that could transport community members to a time that could help reimagine the present potential of the neighborhood. By excavating and expanding the public narrative, the story was able to illuminate the chronology of how this neighborhood came to be. In collaboration with Mapping Prejudice Community Fellow José Antonio Zayas Cabán, the team created a presentation to share with community members who are working to decommission Olson Memorial Highway.
The House the U Built Story Map
Mapping Prejudice seeks to serve as a resource for people and institutions in Minnesota that are working to dismantle structural racism. The project provides action and demands action around our historical, communal complicity in oppression. Mapping Prejudice seeks to align itself with the people harmed by racist housing practices. But the project is embedded in an institution--the University of Minnesota--that has traditionally excluded those same people. In addition, the University of Minnesota has played an important role in developing and sustaining the practices that have given Minnesota some of the highest racial disparities in the country. To be an effective agent for change, Mapping Prejudice needs to acknowledge its own institutional relationship with this history.
MN Transform intern Jamila Boudlali worked with Project Director Kirsten Delegard and Property Researcher Penny Petersen to research and write a digital exhibit that documents how the University of Minnesota was complicit in the historical practices being documented by Mapping Prejudice. “The House the U Built” explores how the University continues to benefit from indigenous land theft; served as a recruiting ground for the Ku Klux Klan; barred Black students from living on campus; supported the constructed of a new housing development that barred people who were not White; and flattened one of the only neighborhoods in Minneapolis where people who were not White were allowed to live in Minneapolis. To assemble this narrative, our team searched online collections at the University of Minnesota, holdings in the University Archives, and a wide variety of digitized newspapers. We dissected maps and photographs, historical monographs, oral histories, and government and university reports for information. We are grateful to archivists at the University of Minnesota, the Special Collections at the Hennepin County Central library, and the Minnesota Historical Society for their careful stewardship of the materials that went into this narrative.
Follow these links for more information about Mapping Prejudice:
Partners and collaborators
Dr. Kirsten Delegard, Rebecca Gillette, Michael Corey, Jamila Boudlali, Kelly Rogers, Zuko Buechler, Hannah Belyn
