Madison, Wisconsin: Street names and slavery

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Many downtown Madison streets are named for signers of the Declaration of Independence. As most of those signers owned or traded slaves, I thought it might be interesting to paint over the map. I've highlighted streets named for people who owned people, and streets named for the few abolitionists.

I marked the location of our jail (where someone died on Friday, February 23) to remind folks about how linked our current disparities are to history. Almost 60% of the people in our jail are Black, in a county that is less than 7% Black. There are structural reasons for this. Check my series of articles for more details on our modern punishment systems.

I did research the founders in multiple sources, but it was not exhaustive and I am decidedly not an expert or historian. I also don't know how to do interactive map layers with OpenStreetMap, where I sourced the original map layer; that might be a fun project down the line.

slaver_map.svg source file

A project made during Black History Month, February 2024.