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On December 23, 1944, James T. Wardlaw wrote to The Minneapolis Star–what is now the Star Tribune–about his difficulty securing housing for his family in Minneapolis. Wardlaw, a Black sociologist educated in Atlanta, had moved to Minneapolis seven months prior for a job with the Minneapolis Urban League. He still hadn't found an adequate place for him and his family to live.
Wardlaw didn't have issues with money, and he didn't notice a housing shortage. However, the houses shown to him were old, dilapidated, overpriced and in overcrowded neighborhoods.
When Wardlaw pressured real estate agents to show him better properties, one of several things would happen: the real estate agent would claim the lot had been taken; he would raise the price; he would ignore all subsequent calls from Wardlaw; or he would admit that the current owner, the neighbors, or the law objected to selling the property to a Black person.
"It seems preposterous that overcrowding resulting frustration, disease and crime could be a part of a deliberate plan, yet this is true," Wardlaw wrote. One part of this "deliberate plan" to attack Black people's housing rights were racially restrictive covenants: legal clauses embedded in property deeds that barred non-white people from occupying a property. See examples of the covenants here.
By the time Wardlaw wrote his letter in 1944, land developers and property owners had written these covenants into thousands of property deeds across Hennepin County.
Wardlaw ended his letter with foresight as to what would come: "These are the practices which during the past decade have come to be regarded as expedient and profitable. These are also the practices which if endured for another decade will reap for Minneapolis a sorry harvest."
Racially Restrictive Covenants
There was a robust mutual aid network among Black families in the Twin Cities who helped each other buy homes in the early 20th century, until racially restrictive covenants took hold of the housing market.
The first racially restrictive covenant was written into a property in south Minneapolis by Henry and Leonora Scott in 1910. Henry Scott would later become the president of the Seven Oaks Corporation, a real estate development company that would write the same type of covenant into thousands of properties in the Minneapolis area.
"Unfortunately, that mutual aid network was really overwhelmed by the power of city government, of lenders, of neighborhood organizations, of real estate agents, who all conspired to push black people out of neighborhoods that they considered to be white," said Kirsten Delegard, who's the project director of the Mapping Prejudice project, which is made up of historians, geographers, and activists in the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota to visualize the history of housing segregation in the Twin Cities.
The real estate industry honed the message that for neighborhoods–and property values–to be stable, they had to be racially homogenous. "It was like selling an insurance policy to prospective buyers. Like, if you have this covenant on this property, your property will be safe. Your investment will be safe. That was the selling point," Delegard said.
These covenants were not only profitable, but were explicitly sanctioned by the United States government: in the 1930s, federal housing administrators required them for development projects that used federally-backed financing.
The covenants also laid the groundwork for other racist real estate practices, like "redlining", in which banks denied loans for properties in predominantly Black or racially-mixed neighborhoods.
Civil rights leaders and ordinary Minneapolis residents alike vigorously fought racially restrictive covenants and other oppressive real estate practices throughout the 20th century, but the long-term effects were catastrophic nonetheless.
In 2018, 74.8 percent of white people in Minneapolis owned their homes, compared to 24.8 percent of Black people, and Wardlaw was right: it's not an accident.
Courtesy of Mapping Prejudice
Mapping Prejudice
The Mapping Prejudice Project
In 2016, the Mapping Prejudice project set out to locate every last one of these racially restrictive covenants in Hennepin County. They wanted to better understand and reckon with how racism was baked into the physical landscape of Minneapolis. From their homebase at the U, the team built an animated map that visualizes how over 21,000 racially restrictive covenants spread through huge portions of Hennepin County between 1910 and 1955.
Today, the map is part of a broad body of evidence backing up Wardlaw's assertion that segregation was a "deliberate plan" carried out in part by the real estate industry and sanctioned by the United States government to intentionally bake racial segregation into Minneapolis's physical and cultural landscape.
Mapping Prejudice employs optical character recognition (OCR), which identifies racialized language in tens of thousands of city records that might contain a racially restrictive covenant. The system isn't perfect; scattered amongst the racially restrictive covenants are documents like death certificates, which innocently identify the recently deceased person's race. So, Mapping Prejudice relies largely on crowdsourced volunteers to confirm that each document is–or is not–a racially restrictive covenant before plotting the data point into the map. Over 30,000 of these documents had to be analyzed and transcribed before the Hennepin County map could be finished.
After years of work, the Hennepin County map was finally completed earlier this year. So now what? The project is only growing, says Delegard. "Just because we've finished the map of Hennepin County, doesn't mean that the work of using that map to illuminate structural racism for people today has stopped. And I would say, actually, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, it's more intense and more in demand. Like those community conversations are more important than ever," she said.
So, Mapping Prejudice will lean further into community engagement work. They want to make sure community input informs their research, and that their research is useful for the community.
Mapping Prejudice had already centered education in their project, but their classroom resources took on new relevance when learning went remote due to COVID-19. Their extensive educator's guide on racially restrictive covenants is free on their website, and includes lessons like a "virtual visit to the Lee House," regarding the Black family that moved to a house on 46th and Columbus in Minneapolis in 1931. The Lees were subsequently met with a dangerous riot of thousands of white people who staked out their house.
Students are also able to take on the work of transcribing the racially restrictive covenants for the Ramsey County map. "Students can have this sense that they're really contributing to a real, live research project, that is providing a foundation for changing policy and policy making," Delegard said.
Additionally, Mapping Prejudice is expanding their geographic focus to include Ramsey County, and they've already made a huge dent in the work. "After George Floyd's murder, those transcription sessions just exploded in popularity. So we went from maybe transcribing a couple hundred deeds a day, to transcribing like 5,000 deeds a day," said Delegard.
The work Mapping Prejudice does is meant to be used by the public, and those property owners who peruse the Hennepin map in great detail, zooming all the way in on the block they live on, might find that their property is marked with a small, neon blue dot–a racially restrictive covenant. While covenants were made explicitly illegal with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, most embedded prior to this decision still exist, although they are unenforceable.
In 2019, the Minnesota legislature passed a law to allow property owners to remove the covenants from their deeds. "That's great, but what we know from our research is that most of these properties that have covenants on them are still owned by white people today," Delegard says.
If people want to take advantage of the law and remove the covenant from their property, they should, Delegard said, but "I'm not going to make this into a feel-good moment for white people." In reality, removing an unenforceable racially restrictive covenant is merely a symbolic act in the face of a century of intentional (and ongoing) real estate oppression. "It needs to be accompanied by a serious challenge to people. Like, what are you going to do after you discharge the deed? That should be the beginning of your journey to action. That shouldn't be the endpoint," she said.
