Racial Housing Covenants in Milwaukee and Efforts to Challenge Them Are Focus of 2021 Fromkin Lecture

The 2021 Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture will be presented by Anne Bonds, associate professor, UWM Department of Geography, and Derek Handley, assistant professor, UWM Department of English, with Reggie Jackson, journalist and educator/consultant, Nurturing Diversity Partners, LLC, and Lawrence Hoffman, GIS program manager at Groundwork Milwaukee.

The title of their presentation is “Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County: Struggles over Racism and Real Estate in the Urban North.”

The lecturers write that “Milwaukee County’s racial geography is the result of an array of federal, state, and local policies and private practices that explicitly classified and separated population groups by race. Though racial covenants have been illegal for over 50 years and unenforceable for over 70, they remain embedded in property deeds throughout Milwaukee County as evidence of the ways in which racism and segregationist systems mapped race and urban development. Our project represents the first effort to comprehensively document and map all racial covenants in Milwaukee County. We seek not just to analyze and visualize the historical geographies of racial covenants, but also to uncover the voices/narratives/actions made by African Americans in Milwaukee in response to them.”

The speakers will be introduced by Dr. Robert S. Smith, Harry G. John Professor of History and Director of the Center for Urban Research at Marquette University.

This will be the 52nd annual presentation of the Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture. Established by Morris Fromkin’s family and dedicated to social justice, it is the longest-running lecture series on campus.

Free and open to the public, the lecture will be held on Thursday, November 4 at 4 p.m. in the fourth floor Conference Center of the UWM Golda Meir Library, 2311 E. Hartford Ave., Milwaukee, WI. Registration is requested here.

A recording of the event may be accessed here.