#HOW TO OPEN URBAN TERROR MAPS UPDATE#
It’s an interactive update of the anti-lynching cartography made 100 years ago – although a full reconstruction of lynching terror remains impossible because of incomplete data and the veil of silence that persists around these murders.Īnother modern mapping project, called Mapping Police Violence, was launched by data activists after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Today, the maps they create are often digital.įor example, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based legal defense group run by Bryan Stevenson, has produced a modern map of historical lynching. Working alone and with white allies, Black activists and scholars continue using cartography to tell a fuller story about the United States, to challenge racial segregation and to combat violence. The precariousness of Black life – and the exclusion of Black stories from American history – remains an unresolved issue today. Her work refuted prevailing white claims that lynched Black men had sexually assaulted white women. Wells, who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror. Much anti-lynching cartography was inspired by the famed activist and reporter Ida B. The activists hoped to spur Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation – something that remains to this day unfinished business. These visualizations, along with the underlying data, were sent to allied organizations like the citizen-led Commission on Interracial Cooperation, to newspapers nationwide and to elected officials of all parties and regions. But the “blots of shame,” as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north. The Southeast had the largest concentration. One map, published in 1922 in the NAACP’s magazine “ Crisis,” placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. In the early 20th century, anti-lynching crusaders at the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute stirred public outcry by producing statistical reports that informed original hand-drawn maps showing the location and frequency of African Americans murdered by white lynch mobs. Similarly, in 1946, Friendship Press cartographer and illustrator Louise Jefferson published a pictorial map celebrating the contributions of African Americans – from famous writers and athletes to unnamed Black workers – in building the United States. Du Bois produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made in income, education and land ownership since slavery and in face of continuing racism. The Black sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Over the centuries, African Americans developed “ way-finding” aids, including a Jim Crow-era travel guide, to help them navigate a racially hostile landscape and created visual works that affirmed the value of Black life. Mapping is part of the broader Black creative tradition and political struggle.
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Indigenous communities, women, refugees and LGBTQ communities have also redrawn maps to account for their existence and rights.īut Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago. Academics and government officials do this, too.Ĭounter-maps produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting the experiences of oppressed people.īlack people aren’t the only marginalized group to do this. Often, the resulting maps exclude, misrepresent or harm minority groups. Redlining’s legacy is still evident in many American cities’ patterns of segregation.Ĭolonial explorers charting their journeys and city planners and developers pursuing urban renewal, too, have used cartography to represent the world in ways that further their own priorities. The result, known as “ redlining,” contributed to housing discrimination for three decades, until federal law banned such maps in 1968.