Here’s How the Federal Government Made the Maps That Crippled Black Neighbhorhoods

By Henry Grabar

If you want to understand the modern American city—and so much else about this country—consider exploring a new interactive mapping project from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. Building off several previous projects, Mapping Inequality is a database of more than 150 federal “risk maps,” the New Deal DNA that would dictate decades of disinvestment in cities. These maps, as Oscar Perry Abello writes for Next City, illustrate "how the great government-baked wealth-creation machine of the 1930s only worked for white people."