The Columbus Redlining map and Center for Urban and Regional Analysis’ Ghosts Neighborhoods project in the exhibit. Courtesy of Gerika Logan
A part of Columbus’ history not often talked about will be unveiled when YWCA Columbus hosts an interactive exhibit that examines the city’s history of redlining and its current impact at the Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center starting Feb. 1.
According to the YWCA website, a local committee of experts and historians — including Harvey Miller, Gerika Logan and Charity Martin-King — localized the national exhibit “Undesign the Redline” for Columbus.
Miller, professor of geography and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, said the exhibit connects historical redlining — the denial of mortgages to neighborhoods with people of color — with its modern consequences. These include food insecurity, poor health outcomes, eviction rates and lack of generational wealth in certain areas.
“This is a very important history to know because it’s not the past,” Miller said. “People live the legacy of this history.”
Miller said the exhibit features graphics and text from the center’s Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus project. The project explores lost Columbus neighborhoods destroyed by the creation of highways — such as Hanford Village, which saw 67 of its 146 homes destroyed from a highway constructed in the middle of the neighborhood in the ‘60s.
“We are still focusing specifically on looking at neighborhoods damaged by urban highway construction in Columbus and elsewhere,” Miller said. “That was our angle on it, but this is something that’s of interest to us more broadly.”
Logan, the center’s outreach coordinator, said the exhibit contains an interactive map students can use to pin locations around Columbus and discover more about each site and how it was impacted by redlining.
“It’s interesting to see in Columbus, we have a lot of change, and in some of these neighborhoods, but not all the redlined areas,” Logan said. “Looking at the differences as well, I think, will be pretty cool for the students and then we’ll get to learn a lot from that.”
Martin-King, director of Student Life Social Change, said she is looking forward to seeing how visitors relate the exhibit to modern topics, such as voting access.
“You can’t redline anymore, but there are practices — there are structural barriers — that we need to break down,” Miller said.
According to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, redlining on a racial basis is held as an illegal practice. Denying or granting loans must be justified on economic factors and not on “race, color, religion, national origin, sex or marital status of the prospective borrowers or the residents of the neighborhood in which the property is located.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, stricter voter ID laws proposed in Texas would stop minorities, including the Black and Latino communities, from voting. The Brennan Center also stated “voters of color consistently face longer wait times on Election Day” and vote-by-mail options exacerbate wait times and will make it harder for minorities to vote. Mail ballots were rejected at higher rates for minorities than of white voters in the 2020 Georgia primary, the Brennan Center stated.
The exhibit will be available until Feb. 15, and the times at which visitors can attend have not yet been announced. More information can be found on the YMCA’s website.
