An Excellence in Civic & Community Engagement Programming Awardee

Tuesday, August 11th at 1:00 PM ET (12:00 PM CT / 11:00 AM MT / 10:00 AM PT)

Join us this summer for a deep dive into the 2026 Campus Compact Programming & Partnership Impact Award winners. This session, you will hear from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Mapping Prejudice program.

Mapping Prejudice began in 2016 with the question: How does structural racism get embedded in the built environment? How does it persist, despite years of legislative, policy, and cultural change?

Based at the University of Minnesota Libraries, the project developed a methodology rooted in partnerships with county governments and community organizations. Community members mobilized to read and transcribe property deeds, enabling the digital mapping of racial restrictions, providing the data needed to drive change. It built new grassroots constituencies by broadening the political imaginations of participants. This approach grew out of a constellation of reciprocal relationships with changemakers focused on challenging the logic of White supremacy.

Racial covenants were widespread across the U.S. before being outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Mapping Prejudice created the first comprehensive map of racial covenants in an American city highlighting how systemic racism shaped housing, wealth, and opportunity. This groundbreaking work inspired communities nationwide to investigate their own histories. Mapping Prejudice has since expanded to partner with groups in California, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, creating the world’s largest dataset of racial covenants. More than 12.500 volunteers have helped map over 75,000 covenants to date.

The project has reshaped scholarly research by engaging the public in uncovering urban history and structural racism. At the same time, it fosters a broader reckoning with these “unjust deeds,” encouraging systemic change. By making historical data accessible and participatory, Mapping Prejudice empowers communities to pursue data-driven, community-led efforts toward equity.
 

Dr. Kirsten Delegard

Dr. Kirsten Delegard, Project Director, Mapping Prejudice, University of Minnesota Libraries. Delegard is a public historian and one of the co-founders of the award-winning Mapping Prejudice project. Her team has worked with more than 15,000 volunteers to identify and map racial covenants, which barred people who were not White from buying or occupying land. Mapping Prejudice seeks to empower community changemakers to translate awareness about these racist property deeds into reparative work. Delegard is a graduate of the Minneapolis
Public Schools, Wesleyan University and holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University.