Dear RSF:

Please join us on Wednesday, 11/30 for Visiting Scholar Colin Gordon’s presentation, “Patchwork Apartheid: Private Race Restrictions and Segregation in the Midwest, 1890-1950.”

Gordon is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of History at the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 1994. He is the author of Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2019);  Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Jacobin, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor).

His current research explores the scope, importance, and impact of private racial restrictions in five Midwestern counties. This project seeks to evacuate the history of private restriction from local property records, and to understand those restrictions in the context of both the emergence of black-white racial segregation in the first half of the twentieth century, and durable racial and spatial inequalities that persist to the present day.

The working map of racial restrictions in Greater St. Louis can be viewed here: https://jebowe3.github.io/greater_stl_covs/

Maps of racial restrictions in Iowa Counties can be viewed here: https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mappingsegregationia/