Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Review

A typical deed restricted community's racist clause, legally invincible before 1948.

There is no historian of the modern American South more preeminent than C. Vann Woodward. He took the base metal boosterism of Atlanta journalist Henry Grady’s “New South” and transmuted it into the academic gold of “New South studies.” His Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 started many of the conversations that divide academics more than six decades after its publication, however it is the book that came from a series of 1954 lectures for which Woodward is most remembered. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, he argues--fairly implacably--that the very nature of the antebellum economy made segregation impossible, and so the militant de jure segregation of the South of his day was a relatively new phenomenon. The races had socially commingled before, and so there was reasonable hope that they could again--it was for this argument that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Strange Career as “the historical bible of the civil rights movement”--that and the fact that Woodward was in Dr. King’s audience when he said it.

Whatever the “forgotten alternatives” were to segregation in the South, it was the reality of Woodward’s day...and now. Indeed, the hope that undergirded Strange Career was part of a movement that saw legally-supported and enforced segregation end and then a push to integrate that census data suggests was exhausted by the early 1980s. It would not be a gross oversimplification to say that the past 60 years has broadly traced an arc of racial progress: from a clash of racist conservatives (conservative strictly with reference to race relations, to be clear) and hopeful progressives, through an apex of idealism with the election of several black mayors in American cities, down to the current Big Sort that tragically makes de facto segregation appear not radically different.

It is in this context that the Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Project provides a powerful digital case study. It began in 2014, and has a well-focused frame:

For the past several years, Mapping Segregation in Washington DC has been documenting the historic role of real estate developers, citizens associations (white homeowner groups), and the courts in segregating the city. Our work has been focused on documenting properties subject to racially restrictive deed covenants, which barred the sale or rental of housing to African Americans.

Put simply, Mapping Segregation tells a powerful story. It uses traditional tools of evidence, many legal documents, photographs, and other archived materials. But it also leverages GIS and as the name suggests, powerfully illustrates the painful reality of Jim Crow’s stubborn legacy. If white Southerners have any pathological tendency, it is to convince themselves that the last major steps toward racial harmony were taken sometime in the last generation, always the last generation. The three presentations that form the heart of the project--what they call the “special exhibit”--form a potent prescription to that disease.

It is noteworthy that the scanned images of the deeds and the analytical narratives are necessary prerequisites to recognizing the full significance of the GIS work. The second presentation in particular, “Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants” is extremely well designed, combining traditional scholarly writing with digital humanities tools, and a user-interface that is as aesthetically pleasing, for lack of a better term, as it is intuitive. Here is a sample:

My one quibble is that the landing page lacks a comprehensive survey of the project’s scope and aim--one has to explore a bit for the power and content of the material to come into focus. The project leaders, Sarah Shoenfeld and mara Cherkasky, would benefit from some reflection on what routes would get traffic to their site, and how they could compellingly grab visitors with the story from the landing page. Doing so could only help us to recover some of the forgotten alternatives to the racial acrimony and isolation we continue to suffer.