Racial covenants to restrict ownership and occupancy of property formally ended in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act. But a local nonprofit has researched those in Ramsey County through legal documents and mapped their use.
Mapping Prejudice identifies and maps covenants to expose the history of structural racism. They started in 2016 by mapping Hennepin County, and the result was the first-ever comprehensive visualization of racial covenants for an American community.
In 2019, their work expanded to include Ramsey County as well. Partnering with St. Catherine University’s organization Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?, Mapping Prejudice unveiled the map of Ramsey County to the public Wednesday evening at the university.
Related: Map of Ramsey County properties with racial covenants on the deed
“We want to be really clear that this is the beginning and not the end of this work,” Mapping Prejudice Project Director Kirsten Delegard said. “Part of what we’re hoping to do through this event is to … hand the baton to people in the community who we are very much hoping will share stories, share expertise, share insights, share action steps not only with our team, but also with the community at large.”
The historical data — which begins in 1914 — is public, so homeowners can see if their houses once used racial covenants. In fact, this will be news to many.
“For the most part, none of these homeowners will probably have known about these deeds before (the event),” said Mapping Prejudice’s Technical and Data Lead Michael Corey.
Mikeya Griffin, executive director of the Rondo Community Land Trust, attended the event at St. Catherine and said Mapping Prejudice’s work highlights how pervasive — and how recent — this overt discrimination was.
“This didn’t happen in 1883, it didn’t happen in the 1600s,” she said. “It happened within the last century, and it’s still relevant today. It still contributes to inequities.”
Kristine West, a St. Catherine economics professor who works with Mapping Prejudice, pointed out that houses with racial covenants still on average have values roughly 3 percent higher than those without them.
This disparity is vital to understanding how racial wealth gaps developed and have persisted in St. Paul, said Carol Quest, a Highland Park resident who also attended Wednesday’s event.
“It’s an intergenerational privilege to live in the protected areas,” she said.
THE COVENANTS
What are the covenants? Embedded within hundreds of public housing deeds found in Ramsey County since the early 1900s are some of the following phrases:
“No person or persons, except those of the white race of the pure blood, may acquire, own, rent or occupy the whole or any part or parcel of said premises.”
“The premises being 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.”
“This property shall never be deeded to or occupied by a colored person and if so deeded or occupied, it shall revert to the said parties of the first part.”
1.2 MILLION DEEDS
To sift through the data and create a map, a software program looked through more than 1.2 million deeds and flagged ones that included language of racial covenants. Then volunteers looked through each deed to confirm that it included such language.
From the data, clear differences can be seen between Hennepin and Ramsey counties. However, this was expected. According to Corey, the two counties are pretty different in regards to geography, population size and the amount of first-ring suburbs.
Within Hennepin County, covenants seemingly created a wall between the city of Minneapolis and its first-ring suburbs, to keep white people separate. On the other hand, Ramsey County’s covenants show up in small pockets of high concentration.
There is a high number in the Como Park area near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. There is also a high number of found near St. Catherine’s campus.
“We think that this does partially have to do with the fact that this is when this part of town is developing,” Corey said. “These areas (were platted) in the 1920s when the covenants (were) at their peak.”
A large number of covenants also were found along the edges of various lakes within the county. Covenants likely would have been seen as an incentive to have whites settle along the lakesides.
GAPS IN DATA
Ramsey County’s covenants create a sort of patchwork pattern in many areas, but Corey believes that this is due to the data set not being complete. Many of the deeds were not readable, so it is unclear whether or not they include covenants. Mapping Prejudice knows there are gaps in the data, and they want to create as comprehensive of a map as possible.
From looking at Mapping Prejudice’s data in conjunction with demographic data from this time period, West realized that the share of U.S. Census enumeration districts that were entirely made up of whites increased by 10 percent to 15 percent each decade.
“Segregation was bad and got worse,” West said. “And it was policies like the covenants that did that work of claiming white spaces.”
And with segregation, differences in socioeconomic position changed as well.
“The upward mobility results really show an increase in upward mobility for white children, but not for Black children and so a widening opportunity gap,” West said. “We see covenants correlated with opportunity gaps that are linked back to neighborhoods.”
COVENANT LANGUAGE CAN STILL BE FOUND ON PROPERTY TITLES
On Tuesday, the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners voted to join the Just Deeds coalition in an effort to highlight the importance of discharging and releasing historical racial covenants on property records.
Although these covenants are not enforced, they sometimes still remain. Just Deeds provides free legal and title services to help property owners find racial covenants and discharge them from their property titles. The board of commissioners also approved an action to exempt residents from paying a filing fee in order to discharge a restrictive covenant.
To get information on removing racial covenant language from a property title, go to this website.
The mapping of this data will allow Ramsey County to uncover its history of structural racism and better understand its demographics. Homeowners will be able to use the interactive map to see how their house fits into history.
On Tuesday, the Ramsey County Board passed a resolution waiving the $46 fee a homeowner must pay to discharge a racial covenant from their deed.
The county will also work with Just Deeds, a Twin Cities organization that provides free legal services to Minnesota homeowners navigating the deed discharge process.
Mapping Prejudice believes the local communities within the county will help give explanation to the configuration of the data.
There are a number of organizations across the country that are doing similar work to Mapping Prejudice; however, Mapping Prejudice has created tools that make the process streamlined if the deeds are already digitized, and they hope to share these tools with other organizations.
Mapping Prejudice already has the deeds from Anoka and Washington counties, and they hope to expand to the entire metro area in the future.
Nick Woltman contributed to this report.
