Mapping Prejudice Partners with Essex County
Mapping Prejudice has partnered with Harborlight Community Partners to work on identifying racial covenants in Essex County, Massachusetts. Harborlight is an affordable housing community development corporation in northeast Massachusetts. They hope to use this work to educate their communities about the history of racial segregation and racial discriminatory housing policies in order to push for more just housing opportunities. We expect the deeds for Essex County to be live on Zooniverse this week. You can read more about Harborlight here.
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Kieu My Phi: Working Beyond the “Historical Moment”
Kieu My Phi spent this past summer as a project assistant with Welcoming the Dear Neighbor? She is a student at St. Catherine University, currently finishing up her Bachelor’s in Public Policy with a double minor in Nonprofit Management and Economics, while simultaneously starting to work towards her Masters in Public Health. Her experience as an Asian woman within America’s broken systems has shaped her passion for working to empower BIPOC women in the classroom, and fight for policies that address the interconnectedness of systemic issues. Read more about her story here.
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Mapping Prejudice Honored with NCPH Award
Our team was honored to learn that the National Council of Public History has named Mapping Prejudice the Outstanding Public History Project of 2021. The award recognizes work that “serves as a model of professional public history practice.” This is especially meaningful since we have always been animated by the tenets of public history, which prizes collaboration and community co-creation. In that spirit, we want all of you to know that we feel that this award belongs to you! Your commitment to this process of historical documentation has made this work possible. You can view the award ceremony through this twitter link.
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Charlottesville Project Exposes Legacies of Housing Discrimination
Jordy Yager of Charlottesville, VA has been working to map and expose the history of racial covenants in Charlottesville. By looking at the history of racial discrimination within the neighborhoods of Charlottesville, he hopes to connect history with present day issues. In particular, Yager is working to connect discriminatory housing policies to economic inequalities in the legal, healthcare, and education systems. Most recently he has been concerned with higher number “stop-and-frisk” procedures by the police in majority Black neighborhoods over majority white neighborhoods. You can read more about his work here.
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Golden Valley City Staff Launch ‘Just Deeds’
Last month, Just Deeds -- a project started in Golden Valley, MN dedicated to helping homeowners discharge racial covenants on their homes -- launched its website. But this effort can be traced back to June 2019, when Minnesota first passed legislation allowing homeowners to “disavow” these covenants. Maria Cisneros, a city attorney in Golden Valley and a founder of Just Deeds, was one of the homeowners who took advantage of this ruling. Cisneros realized that if these racial covenants were still enforceable, she would not be able to live in her home. Cisneros did not stop there. She brought the issue to the Human Rights Commission in Golden Valley and launched Just Deeds. The goal is to make the discharge process the starting point for action. Read more here.
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Ramsey County Town Hall on Racial Covenants
Join Mapping Prejudice and our collaborators at St. Catherine University for a Ramsey County town hall on April 8th. This is an opportunity to get a sneak peek of the Ramsey County data generated by our volunteers and hear some of the archival stories unearthed by the “Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?” team. Ramsey County Commissioners and members of St. Paul City Council will be present to hear from constituents about how to address the structural racism being documented by this community-powered research.
Please lend your voice to this important discussion. Register here: https://www.ramseycounty.us/content/mapping-prejudice-%E2%80%93-ramsey-county-mapping-project
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Community Reflection Event: Ramsey County
We are delighted to announce that our volunteers finished reading through the property records for Ramsey County! If you transcribed deeds for Ramsey County, or if you live in Ramsey County we invite you to participate in the next phase too. As we ramp up our data processing and mapping efforts, we are hosting community processing sessions. These sessions will be a chance to reflect on what we collectively learned transcribing Ramsey. We will reveal our preliminary covenant map and historical research by our “Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?” partners. The sessions will also include time for Q&A and community conversation. To register for our April 2nd reflection event, click here, or check out our upcoming events page for a session that fits your schedule.
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The Work Continues
Mapping Prejudice's weekly transcription sessions have transitioned to a national focus. Communities across the country are investigating the ways that racial covenants shaped their particular geographies. Mapping Prejudice is thrilled to partner with these communities to help them transcribe and map covenants. Over the last four years, thousands of volunteers have made it possible to map covenants at an unprecedented scale. Now, we are excited to host deeds from other communities around the country. And we hope our amazing volunteers will help us continue the work of challenging structural racism.
We are currently featuring the work of our collaborators in South Essex, Massachusetts. We are excited to embark on this new phase of our project. To register for please click this link.
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Mapping Prejudice by the Numbers
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Our volunteers are incredible! We are transcribing hundreds of deeds each day. 11,070 deed classifications later, we are finished transcribing Washington DC! Check-in next week as we start our journey into South Essex, Massachusetts. We can’t wait to see the progress our 6,196 rockstar volunteers will make on our next geography!
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Top Volunteers!
Above are the rankings of our top volunteers over the past 30 days and the transcriptions they have completed. Check back next month to see who’s on top!
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Outreach and Community Engagement
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Women in Public Finance
LaRive Great Conversations
GODORT/ALA Friday Chat
Michigan State Digital Humanities seminar class
Friends of the Library, University of Minnesota Libraries
League of Women Voters Roseville
National Council of Public History
Augsburg University
Medtronic
The Minnesota Coalition on Government Information
Minneapolis VA Health Care System: Medicine Grand Rounds
Minnesota Association of Professional Employees: Local 401
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