BTAA-GIN Blog

By Colin Gordon & Jay Bowen   Featured Item or Collection: Dividing the City What is the item? These items feature data on covenant restrictions in St. Louis. They are part of an effort to document the spatial distribution and extent of a mechanism widely understood to be a root cause of ongoing racial segregation and wealth inequality. They make visible these efforts to maintain racially divided access to property and wealth, which were long concealed in the extended pages of local records. What BTAA Library submitted the item? University of Iowa Interesting tidbits An outgrowth of the Mapping Prejudice project initiated at the University of Minnesota The uneven digitization of property records including racial restrictions presented unique impediments to reproducing the research in Greater St. Louis, Missouri The expansion of private racial restrictions in the St. Louis region were mapped from the late nineteenth century to their decline with S