A Reckoning with Race: The Mapping Prejudice Project

The Mapping Prejudice Project is mapping racial covenants in the Twin Cities. Racial covenants are clauses–a couple of lines of text–that were embedded into property deeds to bar people who were not white from buying or even occupying the parcels of land to which they were attached.

The project just finished the map of Hennepin County and has turned its attention to Ramsey County.

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 the “racism behind these racial disparities,” in the words of Ibram Kendi. It illuminates how structural racism shaped the urban landscape, blocking African Americans from critical avenues for housing stability and wealth accumulation.

Delegard will narrate this history and describe the innovative methodologies used in this work. Together we will explore the question of next steps to address the damage wrought by these policies.
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Kirsten Delegard is the Director and one of the co-founders of the Mapping Prejudice Project, which is located in the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota. She 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.
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Living Room Learning is a webinar series produced by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. All JCRC webinars are free and open to the public.