Mapping Segregation is a public history project documenting the historic segregation of DC’s housing, along with its schools, playgrounds, and other public spaces. To date the project has focused on racially restrictive housing covenants, which had a dramatic impact on the development of the nation’s capital decades before government-sanctioned redlining policies were implemented in cities across the country.
Organized by Prologue DC and GIS mapping specialist Brian Kraft of JMT Technology Group, the project was launched in January 2014 and has been funded in part by Humanities DC and the DC Preservation League.
Follow our work!
- Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants reveals why one DC neighborhood was central to the struggle to abolish housing restrictions nationwide. Learn how the legal battles waged along racial borders culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision.
- How Racially Restricted Housing Shaped Ward 4 highlights the influence of real estate developers on the racial landscape of DC’s largest ward, where rural African American enclaves were replaced with housing for whites only.
- Brightwood’s Historic African American Community is a microhistory of the residents, schools, and churches around DC’s Fort Stevens. It was presented at the Shepherd Park Library on April 27, 2017.
- “A Strictly White Residential Section”: The Rise and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants in Bloomingdale, was published in the Spring 2017 issue of Washington History (Vol. 29, No. 1). Read about the role of developers, private citizens, and the courts in helping lay the groundwork for zoning policies and real estate practices that promoted racial segregation. Buy the journal or read the article online. (Use MyJSTOR to create a free account, and add the article to your “shelf.”)
Media coverage of the project:
MidCity DC News
The Northwest Current (see page 24, and please ignore factual errors)
Letter to editor re: Northwest Current article (see page 10)
Hola Cultura Blog
Best of the Web, Washington History, Spring 2016, page 53
Greater Greater Washington (article by David Alpert)
DCist (in the Morning Roundup)
Poverty and Race, April-June 2016, page 19
Preservation Leadership Forum Blog
Washington Jewish Week
Greater Greater Washington (article by Sarah Shoenfeld)