About
The Project
"Urban Renewal and the Fight for Fair Housing in Ann Arbor" digital exhibit is an online repository designed to trace the history of the gentrification and fair housing movement surrounding North Central, a historically Black neighborhood in Ann Arbor, MI that is now known as Kerrytown.
With materials spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s, this display is meant to contextualize historical records of this time period and allow users to explore the history of North Central in interactive ways.
First, we invite you to review the historical timeline of events that this exhibit is situated in.
Next, we encourage you to explore tools like the interactive map and narrative gallery display to engage with these documents and piece together the narrative of Ann Arbor's fair housing movement along with us.
Historical Timeline | Interactive Map | Gallery | Glossary
The settled land of Ann Arbor and the greater Washtenaw Country are originally the lands of the Anishinaabeg (including Odawa, Ojibwe, and Boodewadomi) and Wyandot people (Land Acknowledgement Statement, n.d.). As students of the University of Michigan, we recognize our place as members of an institution that occupies space extracted from the original caretakers of this area by a harmfully-obtained land grant. This trauma, at the heart of our presence here, is ongoing.
With this in mind, it is important to us that we share information that breaks the historicizing of this loss. For information on what tribal lands you are on, please visit https://native-land.ca/. In addition, we invite you to consider reaching out to local Indigenous-led harm repair groups, such as the Native Justice Coalition for those in Michigan.
Land acknowledgement statement. (n.d.). U-M LSA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB). Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://lsa.umich.edu/eeb/about-us/land-acknowledgement-statement---actions.html
Mia Glionna
Chad Kamen
This online exhibit was put together by Mia Glionna and Chad Kamen as part of a project for SI 580 with Professor Patricia Garcia.
They are both first-year MSI students at the University of Michigan School of Information in the Digital Archives & Curation concentration. Mia's primary areas of interest surround racial migration, mapping and community archiving. Chad's primary areas of interest include reparative description, metadata standards, and records arrangment practices.
Mia's interest in this archive came from growing up seeing the legacies of redlining and racially restrictive housing in her hometown of Pasadena, CA. Much like Ann Arbor's North Central area, her neighborhood growing up was also the only place in her city where Black people could purchase property decades prior. Due to the jarring underdocumentation of her own neighborhood's history, she felt compelled to learn more about the historically Black neighborhoods of Ann Arbor and attempt to bring their history and legacy of activism back into the public light.
Chad's relationship to fair housing has been defined by growing up white in a predominantly white suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, which remains one of the most racially-segregated cities in the country, and being the child of someone whose family had been kept from living on the street behind them due to restrictive covenants against Jewish people. As a contributor to this archive, Chad hopes this work offers a space for learning about the ongoing trauma of housing discrimination and inspires resistance like that of the many brave people who have and continue to fight for the rights to shelter, recognition, and community.
This semester, we worked to design this model archive with University of Michgican professor Dr. Robert Goodspeed, who is an active member of the ongoing project Justice InDeed. The project is "dedicated to exposing and responding to the fact that the deeds to thousands of homes in Washtenaw County contain 'racially restrictive covenants' – or provisions prohibiting Black people and other minorities from living there" (Justice InDeed, n.d.). We are grateful for the project's interest in our work, as well as Dr. Goodspeed's help, and hope this project can help fuel Justice InDeed's broader effort to acknowledge traumatic legacies of housing discrimination in Washtenaw County.
Justice InDeed. (n.d.). Justice InDeed. Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://www.justiceindeedmi.org