A Conversation with Tonika Lewis Johnson, creator of The Folded Map Project

Join us for a conversation with 2017 Chicagoan of the Year and creator of The Folded Map Project, Tonika Lewis Johnson. A photographer/visual artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood, in 2010 Johnson also helped co-found Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E), whose mission is to “mobilize people and resources to force positive change in Englewood through solution-based approaches." She is also the lead co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective, working to artistically “reframe the narrative” of Englewood. As a trained photojournalist and teaching artist, Johnson often explores urban segregation and documents the nuance and richness of the black community.  Her multi-media project “Folded Map,” illustrates Chicago’s residential segregation while bringing residents together to have a conversation; was exhibited at Loyola University Museum of Art in 2018. Since then she has transformed this project into an advocacy and policy-influencing tool that invites audiences to open a dialogue and question how we are all socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions that segregate the city. Read about her current project, Belonging. We look forward to an enlightening evening, filled with beautiful visuals that inspire us to reconsider our city and our role in it. All are welcome; we hope you will join us!

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Dr. Beryl Satter: The 'Million-Dollar-A-Day Cost of Being Black’: How Banks and Speculators Exploited Black Chicago

Beryl Satter is Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. Her book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009) won the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Award for best book in civil rights history and the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish Book Award in History. It was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and for the Ron Ridenhouer Book Prize, awarded to “those that persevere in acts of truth-telling.” She is a cofounder, with Darnell Moore and Christina Strasburger, of the Queer Newark Oral History Project. To support her current book project, a history of late twentieth century efforts to reinvest in Black urban communities, she won a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2015 and was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016. The Tenth Anniversary edition of Family Properties will be released in May 2021.

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Dr. Amanda Lewis: The State of Racial Justice in Chicago

What is the state of Racial Justice in Chicago? We often hear that Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, but what does that look like in the lives of our fellow Chicagoans? 

Join us for an illuminating evening with award-winning author Dr. Amanda Lewis for a look into what the data says. Dr. Lewis is the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Black Studies and Sociology and the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At this event, she'll be sharing data from the State of Racial Justice in Chicago project, chronicling the experiences and conditions of racial/ethnic groups in the city. 

This is our inaugural event in the Equity Education Speaker Series at Bernard Zell. Open to both our community and the public, this evening is appropriate for both adults and interested students as young as middle school. We look forward to welcoming you!

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