Mapping Sites of Memory of Anti-Black Violence in the United States

This poster will use a series of mapping visualizations to demonstrate how and where the history of violence against people of African descent in the United States is commemorated across the country. The maps will be based on a custom dataset created using information from the National Register of Historic Places, which is freely available online from the National Park Service, and the Historical Markers Database, a crowd-contributed wiki that includes over 144,000 historic markers in the United States alone.

For the purposes of this poster presentation, “violence” refers to assaults on the body, including beatings, murder, and sexual assault in a wide range of contexts, including violence under slavery, the use of violence to suppress political action, violence by agents of the state, and acts of interpersonal violence directed at people of African descent. Given that the enslavement of people of African descent relied on both the constant threat of violence and the frequent use of violent force, sites that mark the history of enslavement such as plantations, slave markets, and points of disembarkation for slaving vessels will be included in this study. Assaults on sites and institutions closely identified with people of African descent will also be considered in this study, as such actions are frequently tantamount to threats of assault against people of African descent. For example, acts of arson directed at Black homes, churches, and businesses will be included, whether or not they resulted in bodily injury to people of African descent. This poster will also map sites that commemorate ways that people of African descent have resisted such violence.

The poster will include a series of maps that show the geographical distribution of such sites, when such sites were created (in the case of historic markers) or designated (in the case of landmarks and historic places), and the types of violence (e.g. enslavement, lynching, police violence) that they commemorate. Preliminary data-gathering for this poster presentation suggests that such sites are concentrated in the Northeast and Deep South, and that these overwhelmingly focus on the history of slavery. By comparison, sites of such violence are under-commemorated in areas such as the Mountain West, and when they pertain to recent events, including incidents of police violence.

Such gaps in the commemoration landscape matter for the ways that public audiences think about the ongoing problem of violence against people of African descent in the United States. As public historians and activists seek to shape a public narrative of the history of such violence that is both more accurate and more nuanced, it is important to understand how that history is currently commemorated. This poster presentation will further that understanding.