Black Lives Next Door
Black Lives Next Door began as 2021 summer research into a Black community that stood on what is now campus land—referred to by University boosters at the time as "the Negro ... next door." Were they forced out? Did they resist? Where did they go? A group of undergraduate and graduate students and faculty applied digital and geospatial techniques to gleanings from courthouse, property, and university records and oral histories to find out. Their work seeded a slew of inquiries, continuing today, for a growing collection of online exhibits unpacking local slavery's modern afterlives.
Black Lives Next Door
During the summer of 2020, a time of protest against police killings of unarmed Black people, the legal scholar Richard Rothstein wrote a New York Times op-ed titled, “Black Lives Next Door.” Having recently authored The Color of Law, he called for more studies of “comprehensive racial inequity…that allows abusive…practices to flourish” at the local level. Rothstein's groundbreaking work inspired our investigation at GMU.
BLND: Geographies of Inequity
These are the culminating student web exhibits from "Black Lives Next: Geographies of Inequity," a course created and taught, in Spring 2023, by Dr. Wendi Manuel-Scott and Dr. George Oberle. A multi-disciplinary research seminar including undergraduate and graduate students, the course emphasized creative ways to locate "lost" Black geographies and reconstruct them.