“Bull City 150: Reckoning with Durham’s Past, Building an Equitable Future” is a joint project of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Its primary goal is to study the historical and contemporary causes of inequality and to engage Duke, policymakers, and the local Durham community in a consequential reckoning with this past and
present. Bull City 150 takes as its starting point that the social inequities of the kind we see in Durham and the rest of the country result from a combination of structural forces as well as local political and economic decisions, private sector actions, and personal choices. A more precise understanding of the causes of inequality, and the ways to address them, requires that all of these factors be studied in interaction with one another. Community organizations and policy-makers in Durham are urgently working to address existing disparities, but such attempts must be grounded in an understanding of the deep historical roots of inequality. Our hypothesis is that a fine-grain local study, bringing together the tools of historical analysis and social science research, will create a context in which policy makers and citizens can craft a more equitable future. Part of this project’s originality lies in the fact that it considers the compounded effects of multiple disparities in both the past and present. For instance, if we are trying to understand the wealth gap between white and black households in Durham in 2016, we would want to look at multiple factors: home ownership, educational outcomes, employment status, etc. But we would also need to go back in time to see how various forms of institutional discrimination privileged white wealth accumulation over black and how these inequalities were handed down from generation to generation. We envision a multi-year project producing a variety of products, including a book, a website/digital humanities resource, videos, research papers, and documentation of the research model. The sequencing of these products will depend on funding and the amount of research that is needed for each one. The first product will be a multi-media public history exhibit on the History of Housing Inequality in Durham, NC. It will weave together major themes including: the history and legacy of redlining and institutional racial discrimination in housing lending, the history of white and middle class flight from the central city, power dynamics around use and control of land, and the history of tenant struggles. This exhibit will involve both traditional research and community engagement with the goals to a) deepen public understanding of how institutional racial discrimination in housing has shaped the City of Durham, and b) expand public dialogue on the responsibility of public policy and private actions to confront persistent inequalities. To achieve these goals, the exhibit will utilize historical documents and artifacts, data analysis, cartography, oral histories, and video narratives. Further, the exhibit will travel to different community spaces and engage with a range of audiences across Durham and Duke. In each of these spaces, the exhibit will ‘activate’ history through partnerships with local community groups to undertake participatory engagement and narrative reflections of how the history of housing inequality informs such big contemporary struggles such as gentrification, educational disparities, the question of reparations, and police violence.
