Mapping Segregation in Washington DC

Mapping Segregation has its own website at mappingsegregationdc.org, but please check here for updates and links to our talks and media coverage. You can also follow us on Facebook, or email us at mappingsegregationdc@gmail.com and ask us to keep you posted.

Help Complete the Map!

We are partnering with the University of Minnesota to finish researching DC covenants. Click here to learn more and sign up for an online training/transcription session. A kickoff session for our project will take place on Wednesday, October 23, at 7 pm Eastern time.

You can also watch a training session on the Minnesota page and get to work now, or anytime!

If you’d like us to hold a special training for your group or class, contact us at mappingsegregationdc@gmail.com.

Awards and Recognition

Mapping Segregation was awarded a 2019 Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation. A short video about the project is here.

Mapping Segregation’s work appears in the HUD-mandated study, Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice, which documents historic and ongoing patterns of racial discrimination in housing in DC (see pp 38-39).

Fannie Mae lists Mapping Segregation as a resource on its website.

The DC Mayor’s Office recommends Mapping Segregation as a resource for DC residents. The project is also referenced several times in the 2022 DC Black Homeownership Strike Force Final Report.

Washington Post reporter Helena Andrews-Dyer mentions the project in her book The Mamas/What I Learned about Kids, Class, and Race from Moms Not Like Me (see page 92).

D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, a Project of Teaching for Change lists Mapping Segregation among five websites that can be used to introduce local D.C. area history to  students. 

The DC Office of Planning’s report Single-Family Zoning in the District of Columbia (April 2020) references Mapping Segregation on page 17.

Selected presentations

Humanities DC Oral History Coffee Chat (August 28, 2021)

Drawing Lines: How Race Shaped DC’s Housing Landscape (Jan. 27, 2021)

Race and Real Estate in 20th Century Washington DC (Sept. 21, 2020)

Mapping Segregation for TEDx Foggy Bottom (April 2019)

Media 

2023
New York Times
JSTOR Daily

2022
Radio Canada
City Cast DC newsletter

2021
Mapping Prejudice Blog
Washington Business Journal
Petworth News
PBS, Legacy List (segment on racially restrictive covenants about 40 minutes in)
The Washington Post Magazine
Tanya Golash-Boza’s TEDx Talk, Univ. of California, Merced
The Black & White (Whitman High School magazine; see Lily Freeman article on page 13)
Thomson Reuters Foundation

2020
The Washington Post

2019
Kojo Nnamdi Show, WAMU

2018
StreetSense
GW Today
The DC Line
D.C. Policy Center

2017
WAMU
Washington Jewish Week
City Lab

2016
BBC
MidCity DC News
Best of the Web, Washington History, Spring 2016, page 53
Greater Greater Washington (article by David Alpert, May 2016)
DCist (in the Morning Roundup)
Poverty and Race, April-June 2016, page 19

2015
Technical.ly DC
DCist

Hola Cultura Blog

Photos in top banner, left to right: Charles Hamilton Houston (photo by Addison N. Scurlock, circa 1931, Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution); Washington Post, December 6, 1941; 1737-1747 First Street NW (photo by Mara Cherkasky, 2015); Baltimore Afro American, January 16, 1926.