UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Joshua Inwood, professor of geography and African American studies at Penn State, recently co-authored the article, "The Living Black Atlas: Learning Geospatial Ethics from the African American Freedom Struggle." The article delves into the historical significance of cartography within African American communities and its role in resistance, storytelling and community empowerment.
Inwood published the article with Derek H. Alderman, professor of geography at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, in The Cartographic Journal.
The Living Black Atlas, as conceptualized by Inwood and Alderman, not only encompasses conventional maps, but also includes fiction, art and music among other mediums. Inspired by Manning Marable's “Living Black History,” the authors aimed to comment on a series of mapping and cartographic practices used by the Black community throughout history.
"We wanted the idea of the living Black Atlas to be the idea of living connoting a process of always becoming,” Inwood said. “Different groups or communities are continually adding to the Atlas, redefining it, and engaging with it in various ways. But also, 'living' in the sense of portraying Black life beyond racism."
Throughout the article, Inwood and Alderman highlight the pivotal role of mapping in the African American freedom struggle, emphasizing its use as a tool for resistance and storytelling.
One example is "The Green Book," a segregation-era travel guide developed to help Black motorists circumvent and resist White supremacy on American highways.
“The ‘Green Book’ does not contain a single standard map,” Inwood and Alderman write. “Yet, it represents a resistant, often crowd-sourced Black geographic knowledge of the road and worked to map and guide Black travel, providing travelers the map coordinates and advice they needed to locate refuge, respite and even joy in major Black urban cultural and political spaces.”
The “Green Book” is an example of counter-mapping – a term used to describe how groups normally excluded groups maps and other geographic data.
“Counter-mapping is about bringing back hidden histories and geographies and presenting them as essential to how we think about different communities or different places,” Inwood said. “Black folks and the Black experience have always been central to geography and geography has always been central to the Black experience.”
The authors also spotlighted contemporary mapping efforts, including the Folded Map Project by artist-activist Tonika Lewis Johnson. Her project visually connects residents who live at corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago. She investigates what urban segregation looks like by comparing street addresses on the black South Side with addresses on the white North Side and how it impacts Chicago residents. Johnson took photographs of each of the two address locations and interviewed residents to open a dialogue and question how we are all socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions that segregate the city.
The authors also address the inadvertent reinforcement of harmful value systems within mainstream geospatial work. Inwood notes the discipline's historical entanglement with colonial practices and militarism, pointing out how it often overlooks the richness of diverse stories and experiences.
"Throughout history and the development of the United States, Black folks have always been central to how we've come to understand geography," Inwood said. "All maps tell stories, and humans are storytelling species. Expanding narratives and bringing historically marginalized groups into the story are important for restorative justice."
Inwood said that while significant progress has been made, there remains much ground to cover.
“The biggest takeaway is that there's a lot more work to be done,” Inwood said. “We're just scratching the surface. There's a lot of work to be done around the idea of the Living Black Atlas and its potential role in illuminating hidden perspectives of the Black experience in the United States.”