Racial Covenants Research Articles

Lasting Legacy: The Enduring Relationship Between Racially Restrictive Housing Covenants and Health and Wellbeing.

Racially restrictive covenants in housing deeds, commonplace in Minnesotafor houses built from the 1910s to the 1950s, provided a foundation for the myriad of policies that made it difficult for people of color to obtain housing. Though covenants were ruled illegal in 1968, their legacy continues to shape neighborhoods. The Mapping Prejudice Project's efforts in Hennepin County, Minnesota, produced the first systematic documentation of racially restrictive covenants. We use this novel data set to explore the relationship between historic covenants and current health and wellbeing outcomes. Using regression analysis to control for neighborhood level covariates, we compare previously covenanted neighborhoods to neighborhoods without covenants. Today, previously covenanted neighborhoods have higher life expectancy and lower rates of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and asthma than neighborhoods without racially restrictive covenants. Additionally, previously covenanted neighborhoods have less upward mobility for children from poorer households, and there are larger gaps in upward mobility between white and Black children. These findings contribute to a growing literature that shows racist policies, even decades after they are legally enforceable, leave an imprint on neighborhoods. Using the novel data from the MappingPrejudiceProject, we provide statistical analysis that confirms qualitative and anecdotal evidence on the role of racial covenants in shaping neighborhoods.

The impacts of racially discriminatory housing policies on the distribution of intra-urban heat and tree canopy: A comparison of racial covenants and redlining in Minneapolis, MN

Research has demonstrated the impact of historic discriminatory mortgage lending (i.e., “redlining”) on the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, while the environmental legacies of other racially discriminatory housing policies remain unexplored. Using a novel dataset of racial covenants in Minneapolis and its suburbs, the first complete map for any U.S. city, we find a significant positive association between historic racial covenant presence and cooler temperatures, increased tree canopy, and reduced impervious surface today. When compared to redlining, we find that covenants have an environmental impact comparable to the two highest HOLC designations (A or B). Further, within each HOLC grade, covenant presence is associated with additional environmental benefits that mitigate the negative environmental impact associated with redlining. This analysis reveals that the positive environmental benefits associated with covenants are not simply driven by an urban-suburban land-use gradient but, rather, are related to the privilege afforded to the legal guarantees of whiteness embedded in the covenant itself.

The Long Shadow of Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Racial Covenants

The Long Shadow of Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Racial Covenants

Making the City of Lakes: Whiteness, Nature, and Urban Development in Minneapolis

Minneapolis has the twin distinctions of having one of the most highly rated park systems in the United States and some of the most pronounced racial disparities in wealth and homeownership. We argue that this coupling of urban nature and racial inequality was intentionally produced by the city’s real estate industry and local government. Drawing on Mapping Prejudice’s first complete metro-wide map of racial covenants—clauses in property deeds barring sale to anyone not considered white—we pair quantitative spatial analysis with archival research on turn-of-the century greening campaigns and local real estate practices. We use two developments, Nokomis Terrace and Walton Hills, as illustrative examples of the ways in which developers worked with civil society organizations and local government agencies to secure public investments in green amenities, including gardens and public parks, while blanketing their developments with racial covenants. To boost property values, developers paired “greenness” and legal guarantees of whiteness, engineering idealized nature while excluding racialized groups. The result was that 73 percent of park acreage added from 1910 to 1955, the period in which covenants were used in Minneapolis, had at least one racial covenant within 0.1 miles. Our research links urban greening, racialization, housing discrimination, and environmental injustice with consequences for understanding and confronting environmental inequalities today.

Mapping Prejudice

Problem, research strategy, and findings Following the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis (MN) residents and city officials turned to Mapping Prejudice—a project that mapped every racial covenant in the city and its suburbs—to understand Minneapolis’s deep racial disparities. For this study, we investigated how data on racial covenants, clauses that were used historically to prevent the sale of a property to a person of color, had influenced planning practice in the Twin Cities. In doing so, we considered whether and how engagement with data on structural racism might meaningfully advance anti-racist planning outcomes that enhance the self-development and self-determination of racially marginalized communities. To address this question, we conducted 16 semistructured interviews with 24 planners who have used the data on racial covenants, asking specifically about how racial covenant data shaped planning practice, the planning and policy outcomes that resulted from engaging with racial covenant data, and the characteristics of the racial covenant data that made it influential. This approach assessed planners already interested in addressing racial disparities. Interviews suggest that data on racial covenants were highly influential, leading to a new understanding of structural racism, critical reflection on Whiteness and planning, and a new narrative tool for explaining and addressing racial disparities. Policy outcomes included adopting new housing policies, helping residents remove racial covenants from deeds, and implementing redistributive financial policies. Planners felt these data were important because they could be mapped and visualized and because of their fine geographic scale, narrative qualities, and the process in which they were collected. Takeaway for practice We draw insights about the kinds of data projects that other planners and researchers might produce to advance and inform anti-racist planning, including data that foreground White privilege, focus on phenomena appropriate for specific geographic and historic contexts, are produced using participatory and transparent processes, and tell a compelling story.

Mapping Prejudice: The Map Library as a Hub for Community Co-Creation and Social Change

The John R. Borchert Map Library was the ideal incubator for an experiment that has changed how a wide range of people are thinking about structural racism and the history of race in American urban environments. Mapping Prejudice used a cartographic visualization of racial covenants as the intellectual nexus of a project that transcended disciplinary boundaries and invited community members into cutting-edge research work. The Map Library provided the physical space, resources, and geospatial expertise necessary for community-driven mapping work. It also served as an intersectional hub necessary for this transformative research initiative, illustrating the synergies between map librarianship and other disciplines. The work depended on the unique contributions of the map librarian: project management; experience networking with researchers, campus departments, and community groups; and knowledge of best practices surrounding data management, curation, and reuse. This article explains how Mapping Prejudice changed academic scholarship and public understandings by engaging volunteers in meaningful research. It concludes by providing a description of future directions for this project and calls on librarians to lead more work of this kind. The example of Mapping Prejudice suggests ways that map librarians can be leading new modes of inclusive, equitable and community-responsive research.

“Playground of the People”? Mapping Racial Covenants in Twentieth-century Minneapolis

“Playground of the People”? Mapping Racial Covenants in Twentieth-century Minneapolis

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to be Caribbean American than African American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Abstract Why are the Black brownstone owners and landlords in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? For students of housing discrimination, Black West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. West Indian Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African Americans. These advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring certain racial and ethnic groups from owning real property were rife in New York, many West Indians were still able to buy into tony neighborhoods despite the pervasiveness of institutionalized residential segregation. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racialized monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on White owners uniformly refusing to sell. Importantly, West Indian realtors were experts at finding defectors, namely Whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity and sell, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying property in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that “previews” this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from which the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of Blacks “busting” White monopolies in landownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land and where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially transferred the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into White neighborhoods in New York.

Rebellious Lawyers for Fair Housing: The Lost Scientific Model of the Early NAACP

Historically-rooted patterns of racial segregation in housing remain a significant contributor to racial inequities in health, intergenerational wealth, and life chances more generally. This article uncovers a powerful but long-forgotten model for rebellious lawyers in the struggle for fair housing. I draw this model from archival research into the innovative early NAACP lawyers who litigated racially restrictive covenants from the 1910s to the 1940s. Facing a hostile judiciary, and with little legal precedent on their side, these lawyers turned their attention to a fundamental conceptual obstacle to their cause: what they termed “property in a sociological vacuum.” In this view, property ownership as an entirely private manner unrelated to the public interest and social context more generally. Under the vacuum logic, segregationist lawyers had convinced the courts that supporting racial covenants was a racially innocent defense of white homeowners’ property rights. The early NAACP lawyers countered this vacuum understanding of property by radically departing from the conventional norms of legal advocacy. In their briefs and oral arguments, they refuted the vacuum view on theoretical grounds and backed up their position with social-scientific findings that mapped out the pervasive use and devastating impacts of racial covenants in communities of color. Courts had never before been presented with such an enormous trove of social scientific research in civil rights litigation. This strategy reached full expression in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the land US Supreme Court decision that rendered racially restrictive covenants unenforceable. Shelley is a well-studied staple of the 1L curriculum, but legal history has largely ignored the decades of legal efforts that made it possible. This article traces that history in detail. I show how NAACP affiliated lawyers identified the vacuum view of property as a central target in their litigation strategy and then worked with academics and other social movement allies to develop a vast body of empirical research. This strategy enabled these lawyers to fill the sociological vacuum around property. In this way, they forced the judiciary to see that racial covenants were more than purely private instruments of individual landowners but rather had formed a pervasive land policy of racial apartheid, slum conditions, and excluding people of color from homeownership. I conclude by arguing that this “lost scientific model” should be emulated by today’s fair housing lawyers, who continue to encounter the vacuum view of property as a core theoretical obstacle to racial integration and inclusion.

Long Shadow of Racial Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Covenants of Minneapolis

This paper studies the effect of racially-restrictive covenants prevalent during the early-to-mid 20th century on present-day socioeconomic outcomes such as house prices and racial segregation. Racial covenants were clauses in property deeds that prohibited the sale or renting of a property to specific religious and ethnic minorities. Using a newly created geographic data set of over 30,000 historical property deeds (1910-1955) from Hennepin County in Minnesota, we exploit the unanticipated 1948 Supreme Court ruling that made racially-restrictive covenants unenforceable. We employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity around the ruling to document that racial covenants have had time-persistent effects and have significantly affected the socioeconomic geography of Minneapolis and adjoining areas. In particular, we document that houses that were covenanted have on average 4-15% higher present-day prices compared to properties which were not covenanted. We also find that census blocks with larger share of covenanted lots have smaller black population and lower black home ownership rates.

Protection from Undesirable Neighbors: The Use of Deed Restrictions in Shaker Heights, Ohio

Stringent architectural and building restrictions were put in place as the Van Sweringen Company laid out Shaker Heights, Ohio, an exclusive planned community, incorporated in 1912. In 1925, as African Americans and Jews sought to purchase property there, the company devised and implemented a new restriction that, while containing no overtly discriminatory language, succeeded in achieving the company’s discriminatory objective. The company and, later, the City of Shaker Heights would continue to enforce this restriction well beyond 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled religious and racial covenants unenforceable.

The Origins of Identity Politics

The Origins of Identity Politics

The Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects

The Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects, a collection of twelve projects run by the University of Washington labor historian James Gregory, is an excellent Web site dedicated to the social movements that transformed the Pacific Northwest and the United States in the twentieth century. Well put together and filled with outstanding photographs, historical essays, films, PowerPoint presentations, and oral histories, this site is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and researchers. Among the site's most valuable contributions is its highlighting of the civil rights movement in the Northwest, a region largely forgotten in the broad national discussion of the civil rights era. The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project page has video excerpts of over eighty civil rights activists, including Chicano muralists, African American ministers, Puyallup tribal members, and early acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) activists. This outstanding collection would prove valuable in the classroom. That project also has a series of films and PowerPoint presentations on different aspects of the civil rights movement in Seattle. Its creators have pieced together a list of racial covenants for Seattle neighborhoods, with the specific language excluding various peoples, allowing local students and residents to discover the history of racism within their own neighborhoods.

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to Be Caribbean-American than African-American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Why are the black brownstone owners in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? The landlords, West Indian-American? The tenants African-American? These are tough questions. For students of housing discrimination, West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. If it is reasonable to assume that racial exclusions are being consistently applied to persons who are dark-skinned, one would expect to find that housing discrimination has had similar effects on West Indian-Americans and African-Americans. Yet this is not the case: West Indian-Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African-Americans. Moreover, these advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring racial and ethnic groups from owning real property in particular neighborhoods were rife in New York, they were not consistently applied against West Indians, who were sometimes able to buy into tony neighborhoods. While it is true that such covenants were also inconsistently applied against other ethnic and religious groups such as Jewish New Yorkers, West-Indians still stand out. Since West Indians are overwhelmingly dark-skinned persons of African descent they typically did not have the option of passing that may have been available to other groups. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racial monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on white owners maintaining a united front, that is, they must uniformly refuse to sell. Importantly, realtors play a gate keeping role in real estate and West Indians dominated the realtor sector. As realtors, they were expert at finding defectors, namely, whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium for selling to blacks early. Brokers then proceeded to buy significant numbers of titles, which were then off-loaded to fellow West Indians. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that previews this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of blacks busting white monopolies in land-ownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially appropriated the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into white neighborhoods in New York.

Racially Restrictive Covenants—Were They Dignity Takings?

Racially restrictive covenants—subdivision rules or neighborhood agreements that “run with the land” to bar sales of rentals by minority members—were common and legally enforceable in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their demeaning character, these racial covenants took away opportunities from excluded minorities, rather than things, and thus they amounted to something less than the dramatic “dignity takings” that Bernadette Atuahene (2014) describes in her new book on dignity takings in South Africa. In this article, I explore some significant ways in which racially restrictive covenants differed from dignity takings as Atuahene defines them, as well as the shadowy similarities between racial covenants and Atuahene's dignity takings; I focus here on the dimensions of dehumanization, state involvement, and property takings. I conclude with a discussion of remedies, particularly considering measures that restore dignity through both public policies and private actions.

The misunderstood consequences of Shelley v. Kraemer

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) was a landmark civil rights ruling, in which the Supreme Court held that private racial covenants could not be enforced by the state to evict black buyers of “restricted” homes. Fair housing scholars have generally dismissed or downplayed the practical effects of Shelley, since other forms of housing discrimination remained very powerful. Using spatial lag models and detailed geographic data on the location of covenants and patterns of intra-urban black migration, we compare the role of Shelley with other forces shaping mid-century neighborhood change. We find that Shelley precipitated white-to-black neighborhood transitions after 1948 and changed the nature of the dual housing market in important ways. We also show that increased black mobility produced a sharp increase in intra-black economic segregation during the 1950s and 1960s.

Saving the neighborhood: racially restrictive covenants, law, and social norms

Saving the Neighborhood tells the charged, still controversial story of the rise and fall of racially restrictive covenants in America, and offers rare insight into the ways legal and social norms reinforce one another, acting with pernicious efficacy to codify and perpetuate intolerance. The early 1900s saw an unprecedented migration of African Americans leaving the rural South in search of better work and equal citizenship. In reaction, many white communities instituted property agreements--covenants--designed to limit ownership and residency according to race. Restrictive covenants quickly became a powerful legal guarantor of segregation, their authority facing serious challenge only in 1948, when the Supreme Court declared them legally unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer. Although the ruling was a shock to courts that had upheld covenants for decades, it failed to end their influence. In this incisive study, Richard Brooks and Carol Rose unpack why. At root, covenants were social signals. Their greatest use lay in reassuring the white residents that they shared the same goal, while sending a warning to would-be minority entrants: keep out. The authors uncover how loosely knit urban and suburban communities, fearing ethnic mixing or even tipping, were fair game to a new class of entrepreneurs who catered to their fears while exacerbating the message encoded in covenants: that black residents threatened white property values. Legal racial covenants expressed and bestowed an aura of legitimacy upon the wish of many white neighborhoods to exclude minorities. Sadly for American race relations, their legacy still lingers.

Space and Status in Chicago’s Legal Landscapes

In Progressive Era Chicago, jobless men, sex workers, and black migrants were regulated through scales of vice, vagrancy, and race. But this regulation was challenged. The jobless and homeless men in Chicago’s vagrancy scale rejected popular censure and criminal sanction. The sex workers who made up Chicago’s vice scale resisted vice prohibitions. Like jobless and homeless men, they disaggregated and produced mini scales that defied the efforts of authorities to contain and eliminate their practices. Black migrants contested the de facto segregation and the racial covenants that bolstered Chicago’s race scale, which developed during the Great Migration on the city’s south side. Tracking the shifts and fluctuations of Chicago’s legal landscapes, this article stresses the agency of marginal men and women in the design and organization of the built environment in the industrial city.

The Ghettoization of Blacks in Los Angeles: The Emergence of Street Gangs

Despite previous research, no one has traced the roots and rise of African–American street gangs in Los Angeles as it relates to the development of racially and ethnically segregated areas. This paper examines the experiences of the early African–American community and explains the cultural phenomenon that led to the formation of African–American gangs. The rapid migration of African–Americans to the city caused their population in Los Angeles to increase, and this threatened the White community. As a result of racial discrimination and racial covenants, many African–Americans became trapped in Watts, which was formerly a White middle-class community of government employees and white-collar workers. This transformed South Central (Watts) into a ghetto of predominantly poor urban Black dwellers with low-paying jobs.

Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. By Colin Gordon. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xiv, 284 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4070-2.)

The appeal of Colin Gordon's Mapping Decline is arguably the innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (gis), the digital technology that allows scholars to trace change over time in highly detailed maps. gis can map census data and a host of other land records, making place as crucial a measure as time in tracking historical processes. Gordon's maps are stunning visual accounts of how business and government policies generated racial segregation in twentieth-century St. Louis. Yet his narrative of the destruction of the industrial city is equally compelling. It is the well-documented and heartbreaking history of the combined impact of urban renewal, homegrown racism, and the greed of local business leaders. Gordon's history is nuanced and deeply researched, challenging the theories of inevitability that permeate popular discussions of racial segregation and suburbanization. This story has been told in other settings, most famously Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto (1993) and Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis (2005). Gordon shows with devastating precision that humans make and destroy urban spaces—whether it is homeowners attaching racial covenants to property titles, realtors flipping properties and steering buyers, planners assuming that race determines property values and neighborhood stability, or bureaucrats implementing policies that played on white racism and further disfranchised African Americans. These factors, and not unchanging customs or inherent social forces, determined the history of twentieth-century St. Louis.