Historically, African Americans have been “displaced [and] rendered ungeographic” by white supremacist constructions of space that established Black Americans as “others” [...]. Mapping, by its very definition, is world making [...]. Mapping and its relationship with Black Geographies reflects this dialectic between control and resistance. On the one hand, cartographic practices have long created spatial representations that participate in controlling people of color and how they are valued and treated socially. [...] Maps and spaces created through cartographic practices have been weaponized further in the name of structural racism to regulate and disadvantage communities of color. Such attempts include partitioning and exploiting African places and peoples for the sake of empire building (Bassett 1994), surveilling and controlling enslaved communities on plantation landscapes (Randle 2011), designing an architecture of segregated public places (Weyeneth 2005), and processes of redlining, urban renewal/removal, and gentrification that have written many Black neighborhoods off the map [...]. On the other hand, a Black Geographies perspective recognizes the possibility of alternative constructions and knowledges of space and place, thus highlighting “the various ways Black communities create their own unique political practices and senses of place” (Bledsoe et al. 2017, 8) [...].
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Bledsoe and Wright (2019) argue that Black geographic expressions exhibit “inherent pluralities,” prompting us to consider “the different, sometimes conflicting, manners in which movements and individuals envision and enact Black liberation” (420). Thus, it is important to recognize that alternative knowledge systems and counter-mapping practices of Black communities are not monolithic [...].
This idea certainly motivated famed civil rights leader W.E. B. Du Bois when he and a group of students at Atlanta University prepared over 60 vibrantly colored maps, graphs, charts, and tables for the Paris Exposition of 1900 (Calloway et al. 1899). He sought to de-legitimize prevailing racist stereotypes of Black people held by white European and American audiences. Du Bois and his team “deployed the western methods of cartography [and visualization] that had been used to marginalize and exploit Black life” [...].
Later, emerging from the Harlem Renaissance, Black illustrator and photographer, Louise Jefferson would produce a series of pictorial maps of the US from the 1930s to the 1960s that included African American people and places frequently ignored by a racist nation and publishing industry (Yessler and Alderman, 2021). While the antiracist cartographies of Du Bois and later Jefferson were intended to reach and affect the wider white society, other forms of counter-mapping serve goals internal to Black communities. [...]
SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers of the 1960s engaged in conventional cartography, such as the choropleth county-level mapping of racial inequalities in income and education. Yet, the civil rights organization also developed a creative method of counter-mapping the spatial networks of white power and racial capital that supported discrimination within communities with the hopes of identifying pressure points to exploit through social mobilization [...].
[M]uch of the counter-mapping behind anti-lynching was about shaping public opinion and gaining the support of elected officials, creating what Tyner (2019, 27) calls “persuasive mapping.” A foundational step in building a national database came in 1882 when the Chicago Tribune [...] began combing local newspapers across the country to compile and publish an annual count of lynching murders. The newspaper recorded lynchings by date and place (city & state) along with victim name, alleged offense, and race/nationality [...]. The NAACP published some of its first maps showing the national distribution of lynching deaths in the book Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 [...]. The maps, by coming at the front of the volume, helped frame the national scale of the problem of mob violence before the civil rights organization presented its full study. [...]
Probing deeper into the NAACP archives, Dando (2018) discusses another compelling example of Black persuasive cartography; a map entitled “3436 blots of shame” that depicts the number and location of lynchings from 1885 to 1922. The map was drawn by “Miss Madeline Allison,” secretary to W.E.B. Du Bois during his time as founding editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. [...]
The Tuskegee Institute’s Department of Records and Research, headed by Black sociologist Monroe Work from 1908 to 1938, also saw the importance that data analysis could play in anti-lynching advocacy [...] and published lynching statistics in the widely used Negro Year Book, an encyclopedic reference on Black life that included several maps. Work contributed to the production of a now iconic map showing lynching deaths in the US from 1901 to 1931.
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All text and accompanying images published by: Derek H. Aldernman, Joshua F.J. Inwood, and Ethan Bottone. “The mapping behind the movement: On recovering the critical cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle.” Geoforum. March 2021.
