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2023 Annual Membership Meeting

March 11, 2023 @ 11:00 am 12:30 pm

1940s Map showing redlining of selected Chicago neighborhoods.
1940 Government map rating Chicago areas by risk for mortgage lenders.

Join us on Zoom for the 2023 Annual Meeting. We’ll give a brief report on the State of the Society for 2022 and elect new members to the Board of Directors. After taking care of this business, we’ll hear from an engaging guest speaker, Professor LaDale Winling, team leader of The Chicago Covenants Project. Dr. Winling heads a team of academic researchers and dedicated volunteers working to identify the presence of restrictive covenants placed in property documents to prevent non-whites and other minority groups from buying, renting, or living in houses in “white” neighborhoods. These restrictive policies were legal in the first half of the 20th century and are believed to have been used throughout Chicago and the suburbs, as well as in other areas of the United States. So far, researchers have examined real estate index books covering approximately 20% of the City of Chicago. The team has just started researching Evanston and Rogers Park/West Ridge neighborhoods.

Join us to learn what restrictive covenants tell us about Chicago history and how Winling’s team is uncovering surprising ways covenants and segregation continue to impact the people who live here now.

The Annual Meeting is free and open to all, but only current RPWRHS members can vote in the election of Directors.

About the Speaker

LaDale Winling is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, an award-winning digital historian, and an expert on redlining and housing discrimination. Winling’s recent digital work includes the Chicago Covenants Project, which can be found online here. He is also working on a new book, Property Wrongs, that examines the thirty-year battle between the real estate industry and the civil rights movement in the first half of the 20th Century.