In my junior paper, I explored how the racial demographics of a Philadelphia church transformed from exclusively White to predominantly Black within a few short years. I started this project in the archive, looking for any documents that could point to when and how the church’s congregation began to transform. In minutes recorded of church meetings, I identified a period of white flight, where the neighborhood around the church became increasingly non-White, and, in response, many of the church’s White members relocated to the suburbs. I knew that I could describe this congregational migration in a written narrative, but I also wanted my readers to be able to visualize it, so I turned to digital mapping.
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