AS: Cruel Covenants
As the University of Minnesota’s excellent explainer tells us, “racial covenants are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying lands.” Such covenants became common in the early 1900s, and were officially encouraged by the National Association of Realtors 1924 code of ethics.
Because these covenants could be inserted into property deeds—both for individual properties and sometimes for entire developments—they occurred just about everywhere in the United States, from big cities to small towns.
Even here, in Bowling Green, Ohio—as the circled text indicates in the deed on the right.
However, the text of those deeds is almost nowhere digitized on a whole-scale basis. There is no national map of properties with restrictive covenants. The only way to find them, in most places, is to look at individual deeds in county recorders' offices. To make a digital resource aggregating them, they have to be found one-by-one, and entered individually.
Still, a few projects have successfully mapped restrictive covenants.
Not surprisingly, restricted covenants blanketed our nation's capital city. Prologue DC, a group of Washington, DC-based historians, has produced Mapping Segregation DC.
The University of Washington's Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project has created Segregated Seattle, detailing the history of restrictive covenants in the U.S. northwest's largest city.
The nation's "Second City" was also the site of tens of thousands of such agreements. Digital Chicago, a joint venture between Lake Forest College and the Chicago History Museum, has constructed an interactive map of restrictive covenants in that city. To see the implementation of these over time, move the slider at the bottom of the frame.
Perhaps the most work has been done on St. Louis. The Metropolitan St. Louis Equal housing & Opportunity Council has produced an interactive map, as has Colin Gordon at the University of Iowa. NPR has twice reported on this story, and perhaps most fascinating is a video timeline produced by St. Louis Public Radio.
As wonderful as they are, there are two challenges with these maps. First, they only cover a few big cities. And, those cities were also subject to redlining, which also shaped their history, making measuring the effect of these covenants more difficult. We know a lot less about the rest of the country, especially suburban and rural areas that were not covered by redlining.
In 1940, the Supreme Court ruled that racial restrictive covenants were not enforceable. That mostly ended the practice. But once a clause is in a deed, even an unenforceable clause, it stays in unless the owners go through the legal process to change it. As NPR explains, there may be millions of such deeds that still include this language, even if that language is no longer legally binding.
