Alderman Featured in Documentary about MLK Streets

February 14, 2022

Alderman Featured in Documentary about MLK Streets

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Professor of Geography Derek Alderman has spent over two decades researching the hundreds of streets, avenues, and boulevards that have been named after Martin Luther King Jr. and their significance in creating a shared public memory. “The use of place names for commemorative purposes is about creating psychological and emotional connections,” he said in a 2014 story in UT’s Quest magazine.

Two years ago, when film producers Amber Payne and Rayner Ramirez were planning a documentary about MLK streets, they reached out to Alderman, who suggested case studies and themes to help them develop their narrative. In October 2021, Alderman met with Payne and Ramirez in Baltimore and shared some of his thoughts about MLK streets on camera.

In Avenues of Dreams: Reclaiming MLK Boulevards, now showing on Xfinity’s Black Experience Channel, Alderman appears three times. In the opening minutes, he notes that street names are more than memorials to the past. “They are memorials for effecting social change,” he says, and are increasingly centers of Black activism and resilience. 

Later in the documentary, Alderman comments on the history of redlining, the longstanding policies of banks and the federal government to withhold mortgage loans from areas occupied largely by African Americans. “These policies suggested that the areas were not worthy of improvement and investment,” he says. “The stigmatizing of streets named for Dr. King is reflective of a legacy absolutely found in redlining.”

Near the end of the film, Alderman describes MLK streets as a litmus test for where the country is going and whether it is coming to terms with economic inequalities and systemic racism. Underlying King’s asphalt memorials, according to him, is a broader consideration of “whether the nation is being accountable to Black America or turning its back on Black America.”

Alderman watched Avenues of Dreams for the first time on January 25. “The producers were very generous to include me,” he said. “But I’m especially pleased that the film foregrounds and centers Black residents, community organizers, and development experts working to reclaim and restore MLK Boulevards, giving them the spotlight and amplifying their voices. It’s a chance for us to hear the people in those communities tell their stories in their own words.   

“As a geographer, I am so pleased with the way Amber and Rayner framed the question of where we find these streets. They move beyond just seeing MLK Avenues as locational markers or memorials and situate these streets within the histories, development needs, and civil rights struggles of surrounding neighborhoods. Although the focus of the documentary is on Baltimore and St. Louis, the directors’ emphasis on place-based Black storytelling can help us understand the significance of many of the country’s MLK roadways.”

–Story by Brooks Clark

Professor Kalafsky published a new book: Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies

August 16, 2021

Professor Kalafsky published a new book: Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies

Professor Ron Kalafsky just published a new book titled “Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies“. It is co-edited by Drs. John Bryson and Vida Vanchan.

This insightful book explores smaller towns and cities, places in which the majority of people live, highlighting that these more ordinary places have extraordinary geographies. It focuses on the development of an alternative approach to urban studies and theory that foregrounds smaller cities and towns rather than much larger cities and conurbations.

Here is the link to the book on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=SXg8EAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Professor Ellis received UTK ISSE Grant

July 16, 2021

Professor Ellis received UTK ISSE Grant

Professor Kelsey Ellis just received a grant from the UTK Institute for a Secure & Sustainable Environment (ISSE). Her project is titled “Beat the heat: Building adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations in Knox County to combined stressors from climate change and urban heat“. Her collaborators on the project include Jennifer First (Social Work) and Kristing Kintziger (Public Health). 

How Black cartographers put racism on the map of America

February 23, 2021

How Black cartographers put racism on the map of America

Derek H. Alderman, University of Tennessee and Joshua F.J. Inwood, Penn State

How can maps fight racism and inequality?

The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a documentary, helps illustrate how cartography – the practice of making and using maps – can illuminate injustice.

As these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and community survival, running a diverse array of programming that ranged from free school breakfasts to armed self-defense.

Cartography is a less documented aspect of the Panthers’ activism, but the group used maps to reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled.

In 1971 the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new police districts in Berkeley, California – districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated.

In a similar effort to make law enforcement more responsive to communities of color, the Panthers in the late 1960s also created a map proposing to divide up police districts within San Francisco, largely along racial lines.

The Black Panthers are just one chapter in a long history of “counter-mapping” by African Americans, which our research in geography explores. Counter-mapping refers to how groups normally excluded from political decision-making deploy maps and other geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format.

The Power of Maps

Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users.

These decisions can have far-reaching consequences. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s set out to map the risk associated for banks loaning money to individuals for homes in different neighborhoods, for example, they rated minority neighborhoods as high risk and color-coded them as red.

The result, known as “redlining,” contributed to housing discrimination for three decades, until federal law banned such maps in 1968. Redlining’s legacy is still evident in many American cities’ patterns of segregation.

Colonial explorers charting their journeys and city planners and developers pursuing urban renewal, too, have used cartography to represent the world in ways that further their own priorities. Often, the resulting maps exclude, misrepresent or harm minority groups. Academics and government officials do this, too.

Counter-maps produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting the experiences of oppressed people.

Black people aren’t the only marginalized group to do this. Indigenous communities, women, refugees and LGBTQ communities have also redrawn maps to account for their existence and rights.

But Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.

Black Counter-Mapping

Mapping is part of the broader Black creative tradition and political struggle.

Over the centuries, African Americans developed “way-finding” aids, including a Jim Crow-era travel guide, to help them navigate a racially hostile landscape and created visual works that affirmed the value of Black life.

The Black sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made in income, education and land ownership since slavery and in face of continuing racism.

Similarly, in 1946, Friendship Press cartographer and illustrator Louise Jefferson published a pictorial map celebrating the contributions of African Americans – from famous writers and athletes to unnamed Black workers – in building the United States.

In the early 20th century, anti-lynching crusaders at the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute stirred public outcry by producing statistical reports that informed original hand-drawn maps showing the location and frequency of African Americans murdered by white lynch mobs.

One map, published in 1922 in the NAACP’s magazine “Crisis,” placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. The Southeast had the largest concentration. But the “blots of shame,” as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north.

These visualizations, along with the underlying data, were sent to allied organizations like the citizen-led Commission on Interracial Cooperation, to newspapers nationwide and to elected officials of all parties and regions. The activists hoped to spur Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation – something that remains to this day unfinished business.

Much anti-lynching cartography was inspired by the famed activist and reporter Ida B. Wells, who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror. Her work refuted prevailing white claims that lynched Black men had sexually assaulted white women.

Modern Maps

The precariousness of Black life – and the exclusion of Black stories from American history – remains an unresolved issue today.

Working alone and with white allies, Black activists and scholars continue using cartography to tell a fuller story about the United States, to challenge racial segregation and to combat violence.

Today, the maps they create are often digital.

For example, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based legal defense group run by Bryan Stevenson, has produced a modern map of historical lynching. It’s an interactive update of the anti-lynching cartography made 100 years ago – although a full reconstruction of lynching terror remains impossible because of incomplete data and the veil of silence that persists around these murders.

Another modern mapping project, called Mapping Police Violence, was launched by data activists after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. It tracks police use of force using a time-series animated map. Deaths and injuries flash across the screen and accumulate on the map of the United States, visually communicating the national scale and urgency of this problem.

Counter-mapping operates on the theory that communities and governments cannot fix problems that they do not understand. When Black counter-mapping exposes the how-and-where of racism, in accessible visual form, that information gains new power to spur social change.

Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee and Joshua F.J. Inwood, Associate Professor of Geography and Senior Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A relevant article: How the Home Appraisal Gap Negatively Affects Black Homeowners

Alderman Receives 2020 Lorayne W. Lester Award

February 4, 2021

Alderman Receives 2020 Lorayne W. Lester Award

Each year, Dean Theresa Lee and members of her cabinet, with help from department heads, recognize faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences for their excellence in teaching, research and creative activity, and lifetime achievements. 

Due to the ongoing pandemic, however, we were unable to host the annual awards banquet in-person. Each faculty member received a plaque and congratulations from the dean. We posted a video to the college YouTube channel here, which features each faculty award winner. 

Derek Alderman, professor and interim head of the Department of Geography, received the Lorayne W. Lester Award, which recognizes a faculty member or exempt staff member who has demonstrated outstanding service through research, outreach, and/or administrative, teaching, or advising services to the college, the state, our local community, or beyond. 

Alderman joined the geography department in 2012 as head and worked hard to advertise and modernize the curriculum for undergraduates, which allowed the department to increase in size dramatically. During his five years as head, he also worked successfully to diversify the faculty and student population. During these years he was also elected president of the American Association of Geographers, after successfully serving as a chair of the association’s publications committee, the regional southeast councilor, and president of the southeast region. 

Alderman’s research brings him many opportunities to inform the public about issues related to American Civil Rights movement and southern culture more broadly. Much of his work focuses on the histories, memory-work, commemorative activism, and place-making efforts of African Americans as they assert and claim civil rights, their right to belong with public spaces, and the power to remember the past and shape the American landscape on their own terms. In particular, his interests focus on critical place name studies and using cultural struggles over the naming and renaming of streets, schools, parks, and other public spaces as important lens for understanding the unresolved place of race, memory, and identity in America. 

“I am grateful and humbled to receive the Lorayne Lester award from our college, which is filled with many inspiring servant-leaders,” Alderman said. “Since coming to UT in 2012, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with others to grow and maintain departmental health, advocate for national professional organizations, and engage in public outreach and partnership building. Service, for me, is about being responsive to the needs and well-being of other people—to think and act beyond oneself. More than simply a category of annual evaluation, service is the lifeblood of the university and key to the ethics of care we owe to ourselves and wider communities.”

He is a devoted scholar-teacher who enjoys working and publishing with students, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is also committed to conducting critical public scholarship that engages, informs, and helps the news media, government officials, community activists and organizations, and the broader citizenry. Most recently, Alderman has been involved in three major research efforts funded by NSF that involved researchers from universities across the country collecting and analyzing data related to the struggle for freedom from several different perspectives. He continues to serve beyond expectations by agreeing to step back into the role of interim head for geography this year when there was a last minute change within the unit leadership.