The Klondike Memory Project

The Klondike Memory Project is a community-driven effort to uncover the memories of Klondike, one of the first neighborhoods designed for African American homeownership in the American South. Through a participatory action research approach, our team of neighborhood leaders, community development partners, resident researchers, and planning scholars are surfacing Klondike’s untold history, putting its preservation in the hands of residents who lived it and families who carry its ancestral memories. Our process combines historical research – drawing from institutional archives and oral histories  – with novel community-engaged methods that address the gaps and biases in official records that obscure Black history. We gather family collections in homes and community centers, listen to resident stories on neighborhood walking tours, and create spaces for collective remembering and participatory mapping in memory workshops. A cornerstone of this project is the restoration of a historic resident home into  a cultural center to house archives, exhibits, and share the community’s stories.

Far from a static historical exercise, our work directly guides a redevelopment process designed to “build the power of this historic Black neighborhood, while honoring its history and culture” after decades of disinvestment. The research is shaping plans for 900 new housing units, a revitalized commercial corridor, and the $81 million transformation of a vacant school into community resources, anchored by a community land trust to preserve long-term affordability and support legacy residents. In restoring a historical record that holds meaning for those who have called Klondike home, we seek to surface a blueprint for the community’s future.

This project is supported by Monument Lab’s Re:Generation initiative, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation effort to create new or expand existing public art, public history, or public humanities projects.