Mapping Prejudice, a project based in the University of Minnesota Libraries that documents structural racism, is opening up its methods and making its tools more accessible so communities across the country can identify and map racial covenants. These efforts of co-creation and knowledge sharing were made possible by a recent $786,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation.

“We want to create resources that teams can use in their own communities to document racial covenants,” said Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice’s project director. “Our work is grounded on the principle of open-access. We are trying to create platforms that people can use with minimal support from our team.”

Racially-restrictive covenants are clauses inserted into property deeds that prevent owners from selling the property to people of color. These covenants became popular in the 1900s as a means to keep neighborhoods segregated and increase property values for real estate developers and white homeowners.

Mapping Prejudice, founded in 2016, sought to create a comprehensive visualization of racial covenants for Hennepin County and later Ramsey County. Although racial covenants were outlawed in 1968, the team showed that they’ve continued to shape people’s lives, from gaps in homeownership and wealth, to health disparities and access to green spaces.

Mapping Prejudice’s work has increasingly gained attention, even being cited by the Minnesota Supreme Court earlier this year. And consequently, more and more communities have contacted the team, asking how to uncover and document the history of structural racism.

Currently, 22 states allow property owners to discharge racial covenants, and California passed a law in 2021 that requires county recorders to identify and redact restrictive covenants from their property records.

But for Mapping Prejudice, a team of six people, there are too many racial covenants to map and not enough time. Even with the best software and more staff, it wouldn’t be feasible, Delegard said.

Over the past few years, the team has been assessing what resources they need to make Mapping Prejudice a long-term, sustainable project, with an easily replicable methodology. This new grant will bolster these efforts.

The team plans to use the grant in three ways:

1. To further develop its software application for documenting racial covenants
2. Support the exploration of racial covenants in the context of the real lived experiences of Black and Brown participants, and
3. Create an administrative structure for resource sharing and revenue generation.

Upgrading the ‘Deed Machine’

Over the past three years, the team has upgraded its open-source software, the Deed Machine, from a prototype they used to document racial covenants in Hennepin County, to a full-fledged suite of tools they now use for covenant projects in 14 communities nationwide. The Deed Machine quickly processes millions of pages of property records so volunteers can review the pages most likely to contain racial covenants.

The Mellon grant will allow Michael Corey – the geospatial, technical, and data lead for Mapping Prejudice – to enlist outside contractors, in addition to University of Minnesota Libraries staff members, to expand the software and make it more easily installable for projects with their own technical skills.

Mapping Prejudice hired Corey, an experienced data journalist and coder, with funds from an earlier grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation.

‘The process is the product’

The second portion of the grant will further develop the team’s model for community engagement, exploring how to incorporate trauma-informed care into transcription sessions, and how transcribing these primary sources can facilitate racial healing.

The team believes that Mapping Prejudice isn’t just about the creation of datasets and maps. It’s about inviting community members to look at these records and documents, to see these racial covenants with their own eyes, and engage with that history directly.

“That’s the secret sauce of Mapping Prejudice. We call it, ‘The process is the product.’ But that is a very hard thing for traditional researchers to accept,” Delegard said. “Over the next two years, we want to really develop that methodology more, document it, and write it out, so any community around the country can take it and run with it.”

But for volunteers who have experienced structural racism, this process can risk re-traumatizing them and cause them to disengage from the work, she said. And other people, who might be unfamiliar with realities of structural racism, can have strong reactions to these primary sources.

The team plans to create a process for facilitating crowdsourcing that will educate and spread awareness about this history, while also affirming the lived experiences of people who were impacted by racial covenants.

Rebecca Gillette, the community engagement lead for Mapping Prejudice, is working with Arielle Grant, a certified restorative justice circle facilitator, to launch a two-part online series for Black and Brown community members that explores the history of racial covenants.

The pair are working to develop this particular volunteer model, and eventually the team will collect their findings into an open-access toolkit that will include agendas, facilitation scripts, evaluation instruments, and other resources for other teams to reproduce crowdsourcing models in their communities.

“It’s notable that this is even part of the conversation at this point, because just the way I was raised and trained in the history field, this was never even broached as a topic. And I think that the need is clear,” Delegard said.

Creating a consulting services framework

The final portion of the grant will help produce a framework for consulting services and contracted work. For some communities, it’s more practical and cost-effective to rely on the technical platform of Mapping Prejudice than to build a team that can use the software, Delegard explained.

The team is currently determining how these contracts will look, how they’ll be approved, how much to charge for these services, and so on. But they’re already testing it with three counties, one in California, North Carolina, and Washington D.C. respectively.

“The beautiful thing about this Mellon grant is they’re giving us a runway to figure this out. And the only way we’re going to figure this out is by doing it,” she said. “They’re like our angel investors.”

Since community engagement is vital to these projects’ success, Mapping Prejudice is in particular examining how to best mentor local governments as they build trust and relationships across the various communities in their areas.

“We can put all the records that seem to have these racial covenants in the software, but then it’s up to you to go out to the community to engage with people,” she said. “We’re not part of the community. We don’t have the local relationships and the local networks. And the whole point of this is getting people to read these deeds and to take action.”