Research Fellowship News
I am honored to announce that I’ve been awarded one of four Indiana Humanities’ Wilma Gibbs Moore Research Fellowships to research racial injustice and structural racism in Indiana. My project titled, “A Judgment Call: Indianapolis, Redlining, and Unjust Legacies” will study redlining policy in Indianapolis. Building upon the research I completed on the Living the Legacy: Indianapolis Redlining program series, the program to kick off the Indianapolis Bicentennial exhibit, I will be exploring some additional context involving primary sources and visual evidence. Read more about my project and the other fellows here on the Indiana Humanities fellowship page.
Indianapolis Redlining Map Source: Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed February 5, 2021, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/.
And in the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about redlining, I encourage you to check out the Mapping Inequality digital humanities project. Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America is an incredible project that took Home Owners Loan Corporation materials from the National Archives and made them accessible online on one convenient page. From this page, you’re able to explore numerous cities that were redlined and access the original “area description forms” that were used as criteria for evaluation. Beyond redlining policy, those area forms provide valuable data and insight that could be used for other projects related to land use and planning policy.
And here’s an example of a primary source I’ll be working with: the Federal Housing Administration’s Underwriting Manual that was used by the HOLC. There are so many historic and contemporary housing reports such as this available via HUD here: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/research/home.html.
Stay tuned for news about presenting my findings. As of now, I know I’ll be presenting my research on April 8, 2021, at the 9th Annual Fair Housing Center for Central Indiana’s Fair Housing Conference. This is an excellent interdisciplinary conference that will allow me to provide historic context to today’s policy issues and other advocacy work. Registration is now open for the virtual Fair Housing Conference; sign up soon for discounts. And if you are interested in collaborating with me regarding this project or arranging a presentation, feel free to contact me.
On a personal note - Wilma was a great colleague and was one of two archivists that trained me at my first official archivist job. I miss her dearly, and I hope to honor her legacy.