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Urban Cipher game teaches players the effects of redlining

Jul 1, 2024
"We're rolling the same thing, but we're getting different results" — that's a valuable experience, says creator Lawrence Brown.
Lawrence Brown, creator of Urban Cipher, explains how racially coded federal maps dictated lending practices in cities like Baltimore.
Amy Scott/Marketplace

Negro Leagues barnstorming brought baseball to new places

It's just one of the lasting economic legacies of the professional baseball played in the Negro Leagues in the 20th century.
Teams that played in the Negro Leagues often had no choice but to hit the road and play games all over. They relied on this practice, known as barnstorming, to keep the money coming in. Pictured above: The Newark Eagles in a dugout in 1936.
Courtesy Magnolia Pictures

How baseball's Negro Leagues became successful business enterprises

"It was sailing against the tide of oppression," Negro Leagues Baseball Museum co-founder Larry Lester says.
Andrew "Rube" Foster founded the Chicago American Giants, pictured here in 1941. Foster organized the Negro National League, the first league for Black baseball players that survived a whole season.
Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

Want to make friends from a different economic class? Try your local Applebee’s

Oct 20, 2023
Full-service chain restaurants attract people from different income brackets and represent a way to break down class barriers, research shows.
James Williams enjoys a lunch date with his wife at an Applebee's near Chicago. A recent working paper titled "Rubbing Shoulders" says chain restaurants are among a handful of places in the U.S. where people from high-income and low-income neighborhoods encounter one another.
Esther Yoon-Ji Kang/WBEZ

Understanding the civil rights movement as a labor and economic movement

Feb 23, 2023
Legalized segregation was an economic system that determined people’s livelihoods, says history professor Robin D.G. Kelley.
Protestors hold signs reading "Union Justice Now!" and "Honor King: End Racism!" in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In Baltimore, segregation can be felt even in your wallet

Jun 7, 2019
One journalist spent years reporting on segregation in Baltimore, Maryland. He found that segregated communities can shape our economic futures.
A mural of Freddie Gray near the location where he was arrested is pictured in Baltimore, Maryland in 2016.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

How federal policy from the 1930s continues to harm Philadelphia and other cities

Jan 11, 2018
Real estate appraisers would negatively evaluate areas if people of color lived there.
A man walks into a heroin encampment in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images

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Preserving America's movie going history

Sep 21, 2017
Photographer Amy Davis talks about her photo book on the fate of historic movie theaters.
Filmgoers queueing to see Fritz Lang's film 'Man Hunt' in 1941.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Can Chicago’s recent plague of violence be cured?

Sep 16, 2016
A look at the cities’ rise in violence as a symptom of economic inequality.
A young victim of Chicago's gun violence is laid to rest. 

Why segregation lingers in Chicago and the rest of America

Apr 14, 2016
Natalie Moore on her new book “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation”
Tim Boyle (Getty Images)