Public help needed for research in Chicago covenants
The public is invited to join research sessions held every two weeks at Chicago’s City/County building. Sessions are run by assistants who are students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
At least 2,700 index books and about 70 million land transactions.
That’s how many Chicago real estate records a Virginia Tech researcher and his team plan to review as part of a massive project to uncover evidence of the ways that communities in the city once were divided by race.
He is calling on volunteers throughout Chicago to help study thousands of paper records.
LaDale Winling, associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, is well-known for his research in urban land records and racial covenants, contracted agreements that prohibited African Americans from purchasing, leasing, or living on a piece of property. In January, Winling and his research team received a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for this work.
The two-year grant has opened a new and much needed door into the project’s progress – community involvement through public research sessions.
“We have a very ambitious goal of making it through all of those books and documents, and I knew it would take a significant grant to do this,” said Winling, who is one of the creators of the award-winning online repository of redlining maps Mapping Inequality.
The research sessions are held every two weeks at Chicago’s City/County building, and they are run by assistants who are students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Chicagoland residents can register here to join the sessions.
For this project, University Libraries created an interactive webmap to help visualize racial covenant locations in Chicago — and, one day, beyond
The project is focused on the years 1920-50.
This community work offers an important element of public education, particularly as people learn more about the history of where they live, Winling said.
“No one can read one of these covenants and deny its segregationist intent or what the underlying ideas were about the supremacy of whites,” Winling said. “There is no document type that is any clearer than racially restrictive covenants. Making sure people see them and understand them is one of the keys.”
Digging into these documents, he said, also gives the public a sense of ownership.
“To get them invested and to build their engagement with the history of their own community is one of the key outcomes that we’re interested in,” he said. “To maintain a community that is equitable, that’s desirable, that’s worth living in because of its community spirit, and its just generosity, and its reflectiveness, that takes investment, and that takes effort.”
In addition to this project, Winling recently received a public scholars fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on a book about racial covenants, redlining, and segregation ordinances. His project is called, “Property Wrongs: The Forty Year Battle Over Race and Real Estate.”
