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. 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. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s set out to map the risk associated for banks loaning money to individuals for homes in different neighborhoods, for example, they rated minority neighborhoods as high risk and color-coded them as red. These decisions can have far-reaching consequences.
#CARTOGRAPHICA MAP MAN HOW TO#
Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users. Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides.
![cartographica map man cartographica map man](https://www.neh.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/Ortelius-World-Map.jpg)
Counter-mapping refers to how groups normally excluded from political decision-making deploy maps and other geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format. The Black Panthers are just one chapter in a long history of “counter-mapping” by African Americans, which our research in geography explores. The Black Panthers’ proposed police districts for the city of San Francisco, created in 1966 or 1967.
![cartographica map man cartographica map man](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/74/91/4e/74914e2a7d4e0ef137aeb8d321a1e229.jpg)
In a similar effort to make law enforcement more responsive to communities of color, the Panthers in the late 1960s also created a map proposing to divide up police districts within San Francisco, largely along racial lines. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated. In 1971 the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new police districts in Berkeley, California – districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served.
![cartographica map man cartographica map man](https://orteliusmaps.com/americas-paris/AmericasParis-640.jpg)
#CARTOGRAPHICA MAP MAN MOVIE#
The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a documentary, helps illustrate how cartography – the practice of making and using maps – can illuminate injustice.Īs these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and community survival, running a diverse array of programming that ranged from free school breakfasts to armed self-defense.Ĭartography is a less documented aspect of the Panthers’ activism, but the group used maps to reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled. How can maps fight racism and inequality?