On The Living Black Atlas: Learning Geospatial Ethics from the African American Freedom Struggle

ABSTRACT

The Living Black Atlas seeks to create space within geospatial classrooms and workplaces for curating, amplifying, and learning from the seldom-discussed cartographic practices undergirding the African American Freedom Struggle. Beyond a static collection of maps, the Atlas comprises dynamic understandings of the Black experience that challenge staid notions of what a map is and how and where mapping takes place. African American communities have long engaged in countermapping, restorative cartographies, radical geospatial intelligence, visual story-telling, and embodied productions of geographic knowledge that affirm the value of Black life and imagine more just futures. The Living Black Atlas can help create the inclusive education necessary for broadening participation in the geospatial field, acknowledging the social power relations and different spatial epistemologies circulating through maps, and inspiring us to conceive of mapping and its ethical possibilities in more creative and community-centred ways outside of industry standards, professionalized practices, and scientific conventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Geographies
• counter-mapping
• geospatial ethics
• inclusive education
• insurgent cartographies
• Living Black Atlas

A Little Known Map

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary political organization, turned to cartography in defence of communities of colour brutalized by the police. Although some of the specifics are lost to time, we know that the Black Panthers proposed reorganizing police districts within San Francisco along racial lines to make law enforcement more responsive to the needs of Black communities. While the map they created sits somewhat isolated in the archives, it is an important predecessor to a 1971 Panther-led petition to create new police districts in nearby Berkeley, CA. These districts would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighbourhoods they served. Amassing 15,000 signatures, the Panthers succeeded in getting the proposal on the city ballot, although the public voted it down ultimately.

Reflective of the impoverished understanding of the full range of activism undertaken during the Civil Rights era, many may be surprised to find the Black Panther Party engaged in map making as part of the broader struggle for justice. The reality is Black freedom has always been tied to cartographies of struggle (McKittrick, 2006) and the lack of recognition speaks to the incomplete way geospatial scientists conceive of mapping that exists outside of official expert, industrial-academic practices. The Panther maps are an acknowledgement of the centrality of cartography to the freedom dreams of a myriad of communities. This in and of itself speaks to the ethical challenges that face cartography and geospatial fields. Even as professionals and organizations increasingly lend their skills, time, and technologies to assist humanitarian and social justice causes (Štampach et al., 2021), much of what passes for mainstream geospatial work continues to make problematic claims of professional and political neutrality while, unknowingly or not, reinforcing patriarchal, White supremacist value systems that invariably harm marginalized communities (Chomintra, 2022).

The Black Panther Party’s little-known map of police districts is one moment in which cartographic representations were central to broader practices of decolonizing geospatial practices. Activists appropriated cartographic visualization from municipal authorities and planners to challenge established ways of spatially organizing relations between law enforcement and marginalized communities, all with the hope of enacting a more just future, and a more responsive and representative way to police communities. More than a communication tool, scientific analysis or spatial representation, the Black Panther Party’s map exists as part of the organization’s efforts to reimagine and redesign the cities where African Americans lived. In the context of the Black Panther Party’s commitment to enhancing the survivability of poor, oppressed communities, cartography was inseparable from a renegotiation of the terms of Black life and the fight for human well-being and civil rights that is central to understanding Black Geographies and the life affirming practices that make life possible in the broader context of White supremacy. The redrawing of district boundaries joined a wider geography of liberation that included free breakfast programmes, neighbourhood medical clinics, and liberation schools (Tyner, 2006; Heynen, 2009).

While highly evocative, the use of mapping by the Black Panthers as a tool of protest and world-(re)building is not an isolated or exceptional moment. It connects to contemporary efforts in the United States to confront systemic racism in law enforcement and promote community mobilization against these inequalities, including the creation of activist cartographies. Predating and succeeding the Panther’s San Francisco map is a long history of insurgent geospatial work that has always undergirded African American resiliency, resourcefulness, and resistance in the face of oppression – it is what we term the Living Black Atlas. Our paper introduces this Atlas, which is not a book of maps in the strict sense of the word. Rather, it is an intellectual framing used for capturing a dynamic and always emerging historical geography of resistant Black cartographic practices. Collectively these oppositional mapping practices form ‘part of broader ways of knowing, dwelling within, and resisting discriminatory worlds while creating places and embodied practices for affirming the value of Black life’ (Alderman et al., 2021: 76). More than a static collection of maps, the Atlas is infused with dynamic political and ontological understandings of the Black experience that – like the Black Panther case – challenge staid, flat and western notions of how and where mapping takes place. We offer examples of Black emancipatory mapping and discuss their analytical value to a geospatial field that is still searching for ways to advance diversity and inclusive education. We highlight moments from the Living Black Atlas that hold important lessons in ethics for the geospatial classroom as well as ways cartographic justice is tied to how we understand and use mapping to advance the struggle for justice.

Critically, the Living Black Atlas seeks to interrupt and enrich the history of cartography by incorporating and learning from the Black lives, geographies, and knowledge-making practices that have long been ignored in traditional GIS and geography circles. We believe the Atlas can assist in creating the inclusive education necessary for broadening participation in the geospatial field and recast discussions of ethics and diversity/inclusion in ways that feel more real and substantial for historically marginalized groups, especially people of colour. Implicit in the Living Black Atlas is a call, similar to Kelly’s (2023), for more reflexivity in cartography, to do address the multiple spatial epistemologies (ways of knowing) and intersecting systems of power materialized through maps. The Living Black Atlas can also challenge those in GIS and cartography to be open, creative, and community-centred in conceptualizing maps and their ethical possibilities, rather than leaving the field to be defined solely by industry standardization, professionalized cultures, and scientific conventions.

Finally, because of where we as authors are situated geographically, intellectually, and politically, our provocation is focused on the African American experience and our observations of the geospatial field invariably come from working in American universities. The Living Black Atlas is also international given the span of Black diasporic communities and the pervasiveness of White supremacy in the world (Christian, 2019). The Atlas joins broader traditions of counter- and decolonized-mapping deployed by oppressed communities in other times and places across the globe and across different intersecting identities and systems of power (Peluso 1995; Lucchesi 2020). In this way, while we primarily focus on a North American set of examples, the Living Black Atlas should be seen as part of a wider trans-oceanic project infused with knowledges and ways of understanding that stretch across the Black Atlantic world. We invite colleagues to build upon and complicate our initial ideas and contribute future, more wide-ranging chapters to the Living Black Atlas as a disciplinary education initiative.

The Living Black Atlas

From rebellions against enslavement and civil rights protests of Jim Crow segregation to campaigns against police violence, Black social actors and communities have long engaged in a tradition of counter-mapping (Alderman et al., 2021), restorative cartographies (Lanier and Hamilton, 2020), and radical geospatial intelligence (Inwood and Alderman, 2020). Within that tradition, the collection, analysis, mapping and visualizing of data are transformational tools of activism, community building and resilience, anti-racist navigation, and public pedagogy. Crucially these cartographies of struggle affirm the value of Black socio-spatial visions and mobilizing for social change against anti-Black racism (Bledsoe, 2020). For example, a key moment in this mobilization of social and spatial data against racism came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as noted Black activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Black organizations such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the Tuskegee Institute produced statistical tables, reports, maps, and other visual displays to publicize the murder of thousands of African Americans at the hands of White lynch mobs – the intent was to produce an emotion- and moral-laden cartography that would demand national attention and end the brutal practice of racial terror lynching (Alderman et al., 2021).

As a form of epistemic justice, the Living Black Atlas focuses on making interventions in the way Black communities are seen and understood by a wider public. This includes the struggle against racism, but most importantly the focus is also on the way Black communities organize for life-making. This is partly for educational reasons, but more significantly also for mobilizing political power and moral outrage to take on oppressions that deny life. White supremacy not only rests on a foundation of placing limits on the power of knowing, having constructed for generations social and spatial narratives that construct people of colour as an ‘Other’ and denied their experiences of racism, but also through social and material realities that deny sanctity of life (e.g. lynching, police brutality, structural inequality). Contesting these representations and practices certainly was the impulse behind W.E.B. Du Bois’ contribution to the Living Black Atlas at the 1900 Paris Exposition. A hugely influential Black intellectual and civil rights leader, Du Bois led a group of students and alumni from Atlanta University in creating over 60 maps, graphs, charts, and tables to depict Black life after emancipation from slavery. This counter-mapping was created explicitly to affect White European and American audiences by de-legitimizing prevailing racist stereotypes of Black life. These visualizations emphasized how much African Americans had achieved – economically, socially, and culturally – despite rampant racism. Du Bois’ data visualizations resulted in vibrantly coloured conventional maps and graphics not traditionally identified as maps. Nonetheless, these graphics mobilized ideas about scale, location, spatial variation and emplaced Black communities in wider national and international geographies demonstrating the realities of systemic racism. Du Bois and his team illustrated the capacity of using mapping and data science in the service of producing an anti-racist public knowledge that could inform broader debates about how racism takes place and has place within a US context. As one scholar who has studied the Paris infographics noted, DuBois ‘deployed the western methods of cartography that had been used to marginalize and exploit Black life […] The series [of illustrations] launched a powerful counter-argument, stating that blacks had always been part of world history’ and geography and thus legitimately belonged and mattered (Wilson, 2018: 42).

The work of Du Bois fits within a larger history of counter-cartographic struggle. For example, Kelley (2021) eloquently uses the term ‘fugitive mapping’ in discussing how a resistant cartographic sense undergirds the struggle for Black self-determination. She notes that Black (along with Native) communities have for centuries engaged in mapping practices – many of them ephemeral and clandestine – that ‘preceded, exceeded, and evaded the mapping conventions of White settlers and enslavers (p.183)’. Indeed, the escape from slavery was a multi-faceted movement of rebellion in which the enslaved deployed a ‘geographical intelligence’ (Ginsburg, 2007), making strategic use of their environmental cognition, way finding, and embodied knowledge of the ‘slave landscape’. Freedom-seeking slaves could elude capture by taking advantage of a ‘system of paths, places, and rhythms’ created by the slave community ‘as an alternative, often as a refuge, to the landscape systems of planters and other Whites’ (Ginsburg, 2007: 37). This slave landscape constituted its own unique spatial order, which helped form the enslaved person’s mental mapping, and was composed of markers, routines, and subtle changes in the land unimportant or indecipherable to most whites. The Living Black Atlas, because it is a compilation of fugitive or insurgent mapping practices, asks us to think about the map in less standard ways and to focus instead on embodied practices, movements, and knowledge of African Americans who engage in political-affective cartographic performance.

Thus the Living Black Atlas is not just conventional paper maps and database expressions but is a range of geographic knowledge-producing cultural productions that includes fiction, art, and music as well as expressions of family, food, spirituality, education, and travel (Butler, 2018; Kelley, 2021). Take, for instance, the now well-known Green Book, a segregation-era travel guide developed to help Black motorists circumvent and resist White supremacy on American highways. The book does not contain a single standard map. Yet, it represents a resistant, often crowd-sourced Black geographic knowledge of the road and worked to map and guide Black travel, providing travellers the coordinates and advice they needed to locate refuge, respite, and even joy in major Black urban cultural and political spaces (Bottone, 2020). According to McKittrick (2011: 949), Black counter mapping traditions have long existed ‘outside the official tenets of cartography’ and ‘alongside [what some might want to call] “real” maps’. These subaltern cartographic traditions have powerful implications for redefining what constitutes a map, who counts as a map maker and what social and political work mapping can and should do to advance civil and human rights.

By referring to the Atlas as ‘living’ we are inspired by the iconic work of Marable (2006), who outlined a ‘Living Black History’. The idea of a living atlas suggests that the cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle are not static representations, but part of an ongoing praxis of pushing for social change that continues in this present moment. Scholars and civic actors, including geospatial scientists continuously draw from this reservoir of Black cartographic work through the mapping of a different and more just future. Our use of the word living also builds upon the idea that maps and their histories and effects cannot be separated from the biopolitical negotiation of Black lives and identities. Kwan’s (2007: 30) suggestion that morally responsible and socially just geospatial practices require the creation of spaces ‘for making emotions, feelings, values, and ethics an integral part of our work’ animates this perspective. Our hope is that the Living Black Atlas serves as one of those spaces.

Notwithstanding scholars such as Scott (2021), Padgett (2020), Hyman (2019; forthcoming), and Hanna (2012), the geospatial and cartography communities have devoted limited discussion to the intersection of mapping with Black empowerment and story-telling traditions. There is a tendency to represent the rise of a social justice orientation in geospatial studies as a relatively recent development, but this idea ignores the rich tradition of Black counter cartographies, and it closes down the possibility of what we may gain from incorporating the Living Black Atlas into the ‘canon’ of geospatial thought and education. Camilla Hawthorne (2019: 1) notes that many years of Black spatial innovations ‘have not always been recognized as “properly” geographical and have thus been systematically excluded from the formal canon of disciplinary geography’. The Living Black Atlas is an attempt to create a space within geography classrooms and workplaces for curating, amplifying, and learning from these seldom discussed cartographic practices of the African American Freedom Struggle.

This effort builds upon other recent scholarship which has argued that our contemporary map of Black life is ‘wrong’. A noted example is Hunter and Robinson’s Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2018). Working through a variety of sources, including maps, but also oral histories, music traditions, as well as foodways and other sources of information about Black life, Hunter and Robinson redraw regions in the United States through the lives and perspectives of Black people. This approach not only destabilizes a white-centric perspective (associating New England with Yankee culture for example), but also calls attention to the myriad of ways Black peoples have made and remade the United States and the centrality of the Black experience to the broader history of the making of the United States as a nation. Chocolate Cities presents a radically redrawn cartographic understanding of how we see, through maps, the United States and its development.

The Living Black Atlas expands upon our understanding of the cartographies of struggle when placed with the work of critical GIS and cartography scholars who have argued for some time that the field can learn a great deal by consulting and supporting indigenous, queer, and feminist mapping practices (Kwan, 2007; Brown and Knopp, 2008; Dando, 2018; Lucchesi, 2020; Kelly 2023). The Living Black Atlas can have a consequential role, offering an alternative history of cartography that centres Black civil and human rights struggles long ignored in traditional cartography and geography circles. We suggest in the next section that the Atlas can assist in creating the inclusive education necessary for broadening participation in the field and doing greater justice to the multiple spatial epistemologies (ways of knowing) and social power relations that circulate through and are realized through maps. The Atlas can also challenge geospatial learners to conceive of mapping and its ethical possibilities in more creative and community-centered ways outside of the strict convention of industry standards, professionalized practices, and academic definitions and categories.

The Ethical Difference Made by the Living Black Atlas

A cornerstone of recent calls to accelerate the place of ethics in the geospatial sciences is increasing the inclusion and belonging of traditionally marginalized groups in the field, especially scholars and professionals of colour (Nelson et al., 2022). There is a growing realization that many of the institutional settings of GIS are responsible for ‘creat[ing] cultures of exclusion and marginality in the profession’ (Chomintra, 2022), even as we see welcomed growth in the number of Black geospatial professionals and organizations, such as NorthStar. While some academic and industry diversity plans are regrettably just about checking demographic boxes, the guiding logic behind more substantive plans to grow inclusion in the discipline is that people from communities most impacted historically by inequities have a right to participate directly in the process of leveraging data and maps to challenge injustices. Having this diversity in the field is ethically necessary because effecting social change requires geospatial approaches which recognize the situated social and spatial knowledges of oppressed groups and to build partnerships and solidarity with those groups traditionally excluded from our understanding of geography.

The Living Black Atlas is a valuable window into the situated knowledges and social justice experiences of African Americans living with and against the place-based realities of racial oppression. These new understandings of Black people and places can help generate empathy. While empathy can never be complete or unproblematic, it is identified in the geospatial literature as a necessary driver for research taking on a host of social issues, including racial inequality (Nelson et al., 2022). Within still largely white-dominated geospatial classrooms, the Atlas is also a tool for cultivating an ethics of care (Hyman, forthcoming), which we define as a greater moral awareness of and accountability for the social relations, human well-being, and racialized experiences written into and constituted through mapping practices. It is a direct challenge to the disembodied norms that have dominated geospatial techniques. A greater recognition of and engagement with the Living Black Atlas, particularly in the classroom, is valuable because it broadens participation by demonstrating that Black social actors and groups have long had cartographic cultures and have always belonged. The Living Black Atlas allows students of colour to see themselves within the annals of mapping history as well as be able to place their own ongoing geospatial projects within a wider collective memory and ethical register of mapping for a greater good.

Creating a greater sense of Black belonging in the geospatial classroom is not an easy thing to do. Historically mapping has been used as a technology of settler colonialism and racial capitalism – from the charting of the African continent for conquest and enslavement to the cartographic violence behind twentieth century redlining of neighbourhoods and the more recent displacement of poor communities of colour because of urban planning, gentrification and highway infrastructure building (Bassett, 1994; Aalbers, 2014; Bledsoe, 2020). Among even well intended researchers, educators and policy-makers, there is a long tradition of reducing Black people and places to data points on a map and representing them in largely negative, pathologizing ways – as if Black life was only synonymous with crime, poverty, poor health, and dispossession (Eaves, 2020). We believe that teaching about the Living Black Atlas is a powerful counter-point to these cartographic inequalities. The Atlas creates an avenue for highlighting and discussing Black people’s resistant agency and the ways that maps are used for more socially just ends – which is not just necessary for projecting a more affirmative vision of Black people and places but also in realizing the efficacy of cartography to make a progressive intervention in a host of other critical issues and inequities.

Nelson et al. (2022) suggest that the recruitment and retention of the diverse talent needed to take on many social and environmental challenges requires more inclusive education. They define innovations in inclusive education in terms of lowering costs of instruction, increasing online instruction, lessening prerequisites for courses, and establishing networks to support diverse cultural backgrounds of students. These practical suggestions are important but there is also a need to think of inclusive education in deeper ways beyond simply how easy or difficult is it to access learning and mentorship. An inclusive education must ultimately address the fact that mapping practices have long been embedded in structures of social power, rights, and resistance and that ethics-based geospatial instruction must include a discussion of those structures and how to address them directly in day to day mapping workflows (Kelly and Bosse, 2022). Prevailing GIS education has been criticized for compartmentalizing instruction in ethics, power implications, and the social histories and political philosophies of mapping instead of showing how these mapping politics always pervade everyday life and professional practice (Elwood and Wilson, 2017).

Kelly and Bosse (2022) draw from Black feminist thought to help us rethink cartographic and GIS instruction in the classroom and the workplace. They suggest that an inclusive education is one that is constantly asking questions such as: ‘How do we teach and learn about mapmaking? How do we centre power and position in our pedagogies?’ We would add a question: How can cartography be taught as work – both in terms of the many kinds of cartographers (trained expert vs. organic intellectual; powerful vs. subaltern) who make and use maps of all forms, but also the wider social work that mapping carries out in proposing what the world looks like or should look like? In this respect, teaching geospatial ethics is more than merely addressing conventional standards of transparency, accuracy, privacy, consent, and ‘objectivity’. Rather, it is also about creating moments for pushing back against a singular understanding of what mapping is, how mapping effects communities in terms of inequality or opportunity, and what maps mean to people (those who map and those who are mapped) based on their identity and position with distributions of rights and power with society. We are inspired by the influential thinker Katherine McKittrick (2021), who challenges normative definitions, categories and methods of science. Important to enriching our focus on African American cartographic practices, she asks her readers to recognize the capacity of Black academic and extra-academic story-telling – as rebellious, liberation-seeking methodologies – to undo self-replicating, often oppressive disciplinary conventions. Thus, we consider how the Living Black Atlas provokes us to develop a vision of geospatial education that shifts from dehumanized scientific principles to a study of the multiple ways of knowing inscribed into the technologies, places, and practices of mapping.

To be sure, the power of the Living Black Atlas is its capacity to make visible these questions of power, position and alternative ways of knowing and ways of making/using maps. Yet, the Atlas also offers an instructive moment for recognizing and considering the ethical limits of traditional maps in terms of fully capturing and doing justice to the Black experience (or really everyone’s experiences for that matter). Shelton (2022: 346) reminds us that it is possible to use maps to identify patterns of racial inequality (and by extension, resistance to that inequality) but that cartographers can also at the same time openly acknowledge that the way ‘we conventionally think about such inequalities through maps are insufficient to understand the complex realities of the processes that we are mapping’. Black geographer and digital humanities scholar Hyman (2019) argues, for example, that the simplification and generalization we use to satisfy cartographic aesthetics fail to do justice to the complexity of movements that characterized the escape from slavery.

Almost 80 years before Hyman’s cogent observation, Harlem illustrator, photographer and cartographer Louise Jefferson recognized something similar in trying to use traditional maps and other visuals to expand public knowledge and respect of Black life. Her contribution to the Living Black Atlas was a series of pictorial maps in which she populated a standard US map normally faceless and steeped in anonymity with drawings of Black American scientists, writers, musicians, artists, and athletes, locating them in their respective geographies. Jefferson recognized and creatively ‘talked back’ to the dilemma of how conventional mapping writes off Black agency and identity (Yessler and Alderman, 2021). The work of Jefferson and many other Black professional and organic cartographers comprising the Living Black Atlas offer a moment for students to reflect on the justice implications of when conventional cartographic and data science tools fall short in adequately representing lives and struggles of marginalized groups. The Atlas speaks to the need for geospatial professionals to pursue experimentation, improvisation, and artistic engagement to open up ‘alternative graphic vocabularies and ways of expressing how power operates in and through data, maps, and mapping processes’ (Kelly, 2023: 672).

In pursuing artistic experimentation responsive to power, some contributors to the Living Black Atlas have found it necessary to directly challenge and reconfigure conventional cartographic orders, transforming them into forms of more use and value to oppressed communities. Two examples of this stick out in our mind. The first is Dreading the Map, the work of Black visual artist Sonia Barrett that was installed in the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society. Barrett worked with a group of Black women collaborators (The Map-lective) to shred surplus maps of the Caribbean, East Africa, the southeastern US, and the UK – the basis of the triangular trade – and then used Black hair styling techniques to plait and weave the remains of the maps into a hanging, sculpted form that shows the mutual implication and complicity of different places. The installation is designed to challenge ‘dominant “common-sense” idea of the map as a flat two-dimensional surface on which everything fixed’ and argue that we need a new cartography that foregrounds flows and interconnections, which can then frame different ethical discussions rather than maintaining the distancing effects of traditional maps. Important to Barrett’s reworking of cartography is the community of practice and care as members of the Map-lective shared life stories and supported each other as they dread(locked) the maps (Cohen, n.d.).

Similarly, in Chicago, artist-activist Tonika Lewis Johnson created the Folded Map Project, which turns the city’s gridded road map on its head by folding it in half to bring together corresponding addresses on racially separated north (white) and south (Black) sides of the same street. She has used photographs of these ‘map twins’ to document disparities while also interviewing individuals living at paired addresses and introducing them to one another, thus ‘creating a dialogue for folks to confront racial and institutional segregation in Chicago’ (Lane, 2020: np). Both Barrett and Johnson offer a Black feminist reordering of cartography that infuses an ethics of care into the maps they shred and stretch into a ‘restorative cartography’ that centres the marginalized and seeks to heal fissures and wounds from histories of slavery, segregation, and generational poverty (Lanier and Hamilton, 2020). Well beyond the categories of art, their parts of the Living Black Atlas speak to the need for ethically-infused geospatial work that does not hold the graticule unnecessarily sacred but thinks about how socially just results cannot sometimes be accomplished without deconstructing the very map tools that many of us think are the solution. Critical to a geospatial ethics, then, is a realization that the very material form of maps are not just the media of representation but active participants or agents in creating oppressive social orders, but that they also have the capacity to undermine old boundaries, rework social relations, and possibly be reparative.

The argument above is not just being made in artistic communities. Lally (2022) asserts that alternative social and technical practices in GIS are absolutely needed if we are to visualize and understand more socially and spatially complex relationships, and that these practices have to be inclusive of spatialities not fully captured in Cartesian coordinate systems. This is especially important when working with communities to represent their different knowledges and issues, all while navigating the varied and changing ways they define cartography and data. Analysts and activists in the 1960s civil rights organization SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) knew this long before geographers. Carrying out a youth-driven, grassroots approach to mobilizing poor, rural Black communities in the Deep South (e.g. Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi), they contributed to the Living Black Atlas a method for mapping spatial networks of prominent government officials, corporations, banks, utility companies, and law enforcement that worked together to sustain discrimination within Black communities. These power-maps did not show the world in a traditional locational sense, but illustrated the economic and political connections between institutions that exercised a vested interest in supporting white supremacy. Because SNCC hoped their maps would identify pressure points and vulnerabilities that could be exploited by activists in challenging Jim Crow America, this chapter in the Atlas prompts a valuable ethical lesson for geospatial students and professionals about the importance of working with communities to make maps to that respond to their needs and ways of knowing rather than simply conforming to cartographic convention.

Two examples associated with SNCC illustrate the ways to expand understandings of the Living Black Atlas outside of a strictly North American context. The first is a memo from then SNCC president and later famed United States Congressman John Lewis. Writing in 1964, Lewis notes that he had recently been to Africa and that it was apparent to him that ‘the social, economic, and political destiny of the black people of America is inseparable from that of our brothers in Africa’ (Lewis, 1964: np). In the memo Lewis goes on to note that the purpose of the trip was to ‘cement the relation between the Civil Rights Struggle in this country with the liberation movement in Africa’ (ibid.). This led in 1965 to a proposal for SNCC to create an African Affairs Department that would:

Broaden the political concerns of the overall SNCC activity and to make the long overdue link between the struggle for self-determination of black peoples abroad and the struggle of black people in the United States against exploitation (Richards, 1965: np)

The proposal goes on to propose a research department that would focus on Africa and create a newsletter on ‘African Affairs’ that would also help to plan actions – often informed by a mapping and understanding of systems of power abroad – in solidarity with African freedom struggles, especially in South Africa. These examples speak to the potentiality of expanding the Living Black Atlas outside of a USA frame and to see the myriad of ways decolonial and anti-colonial struggles were made and remade throughout the world through resistant cartographies of struggle.

This speaks to the ways the geospatial field is well served by what Lally (2022: 339) calls am ‘openness to the encounter – an openness that recognizes that existing struggles and practices will shape GIS as much as GIS might contribute to those struggles’. SNCC also teaches us about the importance of transforming data and maps into actionable resources capable of raising political consciousness and combatting inequities. Lally (2022) proposes the development of gis (geographical imagination systems), an enriching and expanding of the standard GIS by ‘incorporating other ways of knowing, interpreting, and playing with space’. It is our contention that the Living Black Atlas provides a helpful avenue for considering how geographic information can be imagined and materialized in more creative and socially just ways.

Concluding Remarks

If we accept the recent call of Nelson et al. (2022) to develop a fundamentally different geospatial science by diversifying our professional networks, incorporating an empathy for others into our professionalized practices, and promoting inclusive education – then it is our contention that this redefining of science cannot proceed without an understanding of the Living Black Atlas. Diversifying GIS is not just about widening the demographics of talent in the field, but doing greater justice to the full range of histories and identities that have comprised cartographic performance and recognizing the many years of Black contributions to mapping along ethical and social justice lines. More than merely making the geospatial community sensitive to Black lives and geographies. The Atlas is about acknowledging and being affected by alternative cartographic practices of Black social actors, groups, and institutions and the emphasis they place on appropriating, transcending, and warping conventional ideas about mapping as an act of self-determination, freedom-making, and healing. In the Living Black Atlas lay the seeds for imagining and realizing a geospatial field beyond serving dominant social and political interests of racism, settler colonialism, capitalism, militarism, and patriarchy.

Please allow us to close by being very clear about something. The Living Black Atlas is not part of a feel-good moment for the geospatial field or a vindication that maps are as important as geographers have always suggested them to be. Indeed, in the 1960s when civil rights organizations such as the Black Panther Party and others such as SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) were mapping against racism, the debates and work of most academic geography and cartography scholars and practitioners at the time were secluded from, if not deaf to, the geographic imaginations, socio-political needs, and cartographic senses of marginalized communities. Recognition of the Living Black Atlas is not just about acknowledging diverse, alternative mapping traditions but building a solidarity with them, making amends for past cartographic and social violences of our discipline, and contributing to a reformation of the map itself and its ethical registers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSF: [Grant Number 1660274].

Notes on contributors

Derek H. Alderman

Derek H. Alderman is a Professor and former Head in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee. He is a past President of the American Association of Geographers. His interests are in cultural and historical geography with a focus on race, public memory, and critical place naming and mapping studies–all with the goal of amplifying geographies of the African American Freedom Struggle. Along with Joshua Inwood, he is interested in advancing a deeper understanding of Black resistant cartographic practices as a form of civil rights activism.

Joshua Inwood

Joshua Inwood is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He is a human geographer whose work focuses on questions of race and racism and the US civil rights movement. Along with Derek Alderman, Dr. Inwood is working on a National Science Foundation-funded project investigating the role of counter-mapping and other forms of radical geographic knowledge production within the 1960s civil rights organization SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).