mapping prejudice

[mellowtigger]

I'm so proud of my city, county, state, and local university for creating a first-of-its-kind map in the USA, using a massive volunteer corps.  Mapping Prejudice examined deeds for houses to identify legal clauses that excluded black people from living in those homes, and they created a map over time.  It is amazing.  Their effort resulted in a new state law and a service to help people remove such language from their deeds.

What is a racial covenant?  Here are examples from actual deeds:

"The party of the second part hereby agrees that the premises hereby conveyed shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.  Said restrictions and covenants shall run with the land and any breach of any or either thereof shall work a forfeiture of title, which may be enforced by re-entry."

"No persons of any race other than the Aryan race shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant."

"... the said premises shall not at any time be sold, conveyed, leased, or sublet, or occupied by any person or persons who are not full bloods of the so-called Caucasian or White race. And this condition and covenant shall run with the land and bind the heirs, executors, administrators and assigns of the party of the second part."
 

I recommend watching this YouTube video describing the projects and their results.  (It's 1 hour long and well worth the time.)  It includes a lot of local and national history with newspaper clippings.  The first covenant appeared locally in 1910, but we watch the spread of covenants across the map as the racial purity effort metastasizes across the region.  It is a powerful visualization.  Redlining and freeways are also powerful forces shaping community demographics.  It becomes obvious how racism becomes integrated into our systems themselves.  You can reach the original publications by clicking each image here.



From the video, I learned that they used 3,000 volunteers on the initial project for Hennepin County (Minneapolis).  They added another 3,000 volunteers for the next project for Ramsey County (St. Paul), donating 21,000 hours of labor to help compile this data.  Kudos to every one of them!

Despite being outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, covenants are still written into many deeds.  If you live in the Twin Cities area and have a covenant in your deed, you may contact Just Deeds for assistance in removing that language from the contract.  For free.  How convenient!

Comments

[geowench]

WOW. I didn't think I could be this profoundly shocked.

[mellowtigger]

Right? It's easy to talk about concepts and histories but still fail to "reach" anyone. Actually seeing the text and watching the map change over time just seems so much more obvious and compelling. I hope we get more of these #DataIsBeautiful visualizations to help teach the racial disparity message. I think they are very effective. It took a massive effort (21,000 hours!) to distill into these summaries.

[danieldwilliam]

That is facinating whilst also being awful.

I trained in Scots Law. We (Scotland) used covenants in fuedal property titles for things like building specifications (roofs must be made of X slate, walls of Lothian greenstone) or restrictions on trades (no tanneries or breweries) or immmoral purposes (no selling alcohol). These were often sneakily designed to benefit the seller of the land by obliging the buyer to build their house out of materials from the sellers quarry. I don't remember seeing any use of them to restrict who could live there on "social" grounds. I wonder if it happened. I'll ask around my mates who still practice.

[mellowtigger]

Please report back if you learn of anything. Legal details are often obscure, so most people never know of such details. It's surprising what you find when you specifically look at the data "hidden" in plain sight.

[mrdreamjeans]

May I share this valuable information?

[mellowtigger]

Absolutely.

[mrdreamjeans]

Thank you!

[mellowtigger]

Volunteers helped again to map the Rochester area in southeast Minnesota. You can find the search tool at the very bottom of this MPR article.