Author Karen Benjamin asked the crowd assembled at Knollwood Baptist Church to answer a simple question by a show of hands.

“How many of you know about redlining?” she asked.

Nearly every one of the more than 100 people noshing on lunch in a church meeting raised her (or his) hand.

Which wasn’t terribly surprising as plenty of people know that redlining reinforced segregation in cities. Lenders drew red lines around “undesirable” neighborhoods and denied loans to Black borrowers in those areas if they wanted to move.

“I’m just embarrassed that I didn’t hear about it until I got to City Hall in my late 40s,” said Martha Wood, the city’s mayor from 1989-1997.

What is surprising is the cutting-edge role little old Winston-Salem played in standardizing the use of restrictive deeds that pa

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