Black Cartographers Used Maps to Fight Racism in America

Mapping has been a tool for African Americans to illuminate injustice and empower their communities.

Published on Feb. 8, 2026

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Cartography has long been a way for African Americans to fight for equality and help each other navigate a racially hostile landscape. The Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s used maps to reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled, proposing new police districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions. This is just one example of "counter-mapping" by African Americans, where marginalized groups use maps and geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format.

Why it matters

Maps are not ideologically neutral - the choices mapmakers make about what to include and exclude can have far-reaching consequences, as seen with the practice of "redlining" that contributed to housing discrimination for decades. Counter-mapping allows oppressed groups like African Americans to produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting their own experiences and perspectives.

The details

Over the centuries, African Americans have developed various forms of counter-mapping, from "way-finding" aids to help navigate a racist landscape, to data visualizations like the NAACP's 1922 map documenting 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. This cartography was used to spur political action, like efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. Today, digital counter-mapping projects like the Equal Justice Initiative's interactive map of historical lynchings and the Mapping Police Violence project continue this tradition of using maps to expose and challenge racism.

  • In 1971, the Black Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new police districts in Berkeley, California.
  • In the late 1960s, the Black Panthers created a map proposing to divide up police districts within San Francisco, largely along racial lines.
  • In 1922, the NAACP published a map in its magazine "Crisis" that placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years.

The players

Black Panther Party

A 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group that focused on African American empowerment and community survival, including through the use of counter-mapping.

W.E.B. Du Bois

A Black sociologist and civil rights leader who produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made since slavery.

Ida B. Wells

A famed activist and reporter who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror through anti-lynching cartography.

Equal Justice Initiative

An Alabama-based legal defense group that has produced a modern interactive map of historical lynchings.

Mapping Police Violence

A data activism project launched after Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 that tracks police use of force using a time-series animated map.

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What they’re saying

“The 'blots of shame,' as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north.”

— Madeline Allison, Mapmaker (NAACP's magazine "Crisis")

The takeaway

Counter-mapping allows oppressed groups like African Americans to produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting their own experiences and perspectives, with the goal of spurring social change by exposing the how-and-where of racism in accessible visual form.