Housing Is Everything

A significant element of the civil rights story, one that continues to reverberate today throughout Birmingham and other cities, is the extraordinary impact of housing on the ability of individuals, families, and communities to prosper and improve their lives. Housing discrimination, in multiple forms, was (and, in cases, still is) a poorly-disguised mechanism of government and business determined to deny opportunity to Black and other minority populations. Studies have shown the enormous negative repercussions of unfair and deficient  housing policies on education, health, policing practices, environmental pollution, and generational wealth.

In order to combat the lack of knowledge and attention surrounding Housing as a discriminatory tool, KIDS is teaming with the National Parks Conservation Association and the National Park Service. Together, we are creating educational tools and programs focused on this often-overlooked issue.

Highlights: 

• Our team is collecting and organizing oral histories from individuals whose families’ homes were directly affected by the intentional placement of interstate highways as a means of disrupting thriving Black neighborhoods.
• Working closely with the National Parks Conservation Association, we are helping to create story maps to illustrate and explain Birmingham’s discriminatory housing practices and their legacies—including a map that highlights the many ways that Birmingham’s segregated Black neighborhoods, even under Jim Crow, created the assets that made for thriving communities—music, clubs, churches, businesses, banks, camps, and more.
• With the KIDS initiative, Coalition for True History, we helped shape the new state standards for teaching social studies to illuminate the central role of housing discrimination, a topic we were never taught in school. The 2024 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies incorporates our team’s specific recommendations, encouraging teachers to address housing issues in grades 5, 8, 10, 11, and 12.
• KIDS is currently working with Birmingham-area K-12 schools to create and pilot lesson plans that teach students the history of redlining and other aspects of housing discrimination, with funding from Alabama Humanities Alliance, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

See first KIDS initiative, Sharing Our Stories

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