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• DCLA Program: Mapping Segregation in Washington DC – Completing the Map

  • When
    08 Oct 2025
  •  
    6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
  • Location
    Online

  Mapping Segregation in Washington DC is a digital public history project that documents the use of racially restrictive housing covenants during the first half of the 20th century. These covenants, which legally barred the conveyance of property to African Americans and sometimes others, were used by real estate developers and white citizens associations in DC and across the country to create and maintain racial barriers. Upheld by the courts, covenants assigned value to housing and to entire neighborhoods based on the race of their occupants, and made residential segregation the norm. Federal policy and local zoning codes served to institutionalize segregation and the displacement of Black residents.

  On Wednesday, October 8, from 6:30 to 8 pm, project co-founder Mara Cherkasky will present the history of housing segregation in DC and then train YOU! to help document racially restrictive covenants, using the crowd-sourced research platform Zooniverse.

  REGISTER HERE

  

  
  

  
  

  Mara Cherkasky is a historian, researcher, and writer focusing on DC, especially the city’s racial history. A former journalist, she has collaborated on more than a dozen Neighborhood Heritage Trails as well as the DC 20th Century African American Civil Rights Tour and the Downtown DC Women in History Tour. She has authored books and articles, contributed research to exhibitions and documentary films, and developed historic-site signage. Mara speaks frequently on systemic racism to civic and business organizations, as well as to classrooms from elementary school level up. She is affiliated with the George Washington University as a Non-Resident Scholar. On the side she heads up the archives team at the 200-year-old All Souls Church, Unitarian.

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