ROCHESTER, N.Y. — How has history shaped our neighborhoods? It's a question that inspired former fourth-grade teacher Shane Wiegand to find an answer for. 

“My students and I started looking into that question and learned we had a rich civil rights history in Rochester, New York,” said Wiegand, co-executive director of the Antiracist Curriculum Project. “We had some really scary policies like redlining and racial covenants that people, activists of color and their allies worked to try to change and are still working to change.”

Collaborating with scholars and students from the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester, Wiegand and his team wanted to develop a curriculum and instructional resources.

“It's meant to be something that lasts for a really long time that everyone has access to, to learn about our local history from enslavement to racist policies like redlining,” Wiegand said. “My students said, ‘you've got to share this with other people.’”

So, they got to work creating a digital map for all audiences, illustrating how racist policies of the past shaped neighborhoods in Rochester.

“This isn't Black history or white history, it's American history," Wiegand said. "And slowly these stories got hidden and weren't taught in many of our communities. And I think together we got to start telling it.”

Displaying redlining, to segregation and highlighting notable events along the way, one of the marks made on the map shares the story of Dr. Walter Cooper. 

“The students in my class, you know, 50% or more students of color, they read an oral history from Dr. Walter Cooper who integrated Henrietta in 1958 with his wife, Helen Cooper, through a NAACP coordinated effort,” Weigand said. “They didn't believe it. Henrietta was only white people in 1958?”

Just 66 years — that’s how long ago one of Rochester's suburbs was integrated.