Spokane residents can now see a map of every racial property covenant in their county.
Since 2022, researchers at Eastern Washington University have been combing through records to find documents that contain the now-unenforceable restrictions that largely prevented Black Americans from buying or living in certain properties.
It’s hard work to dig through book after book for something you’re not sure you want to find, project leader Tara Kelly said.
"There's those moments where we find a racially restrictive covenant," she told SPR News. "And on the one hand, you want to celebrate: 'We're doing this research and we found something, this really backs up our research process and our efforts.' And then at the same time, you think, 'Oh… I found one.'"
Kelly said her team is preparing to roll out maps of all of the counties in Eastern Washington in the coming months, including hosting workshops to teach residents to use the maps and next steps they can take if they find a covenant on their property.
Spokane will host two such workshops in the coming month.
The first will be held October 26 at the South Hill from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and November 9 at the Shadle Park Library from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Kelly, EWU History Professor Larry Cebula and the researchers at Eastern were tasked with finding the covenants in the state’s eastern 20 counties, while a team at the University of Washington tackled the west side of the state.
SPR Morning Edition Host Owen Henderson spoke with Cebula about the project.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: For people who don't know, what is a racially restrictive housing covenant?
LARRY CEBULA: Well, property covenants go back hundreds of years, back to English history, and a covenant is basically a restriction that attaches to a deed in a binding way. You can sell the house and somebody else owns the house, but the covenant still goes along with it. Covenants predate zoning, in fact.
And traditionally, when a builder creates a neighborhood, most neighborhoods in Spokane are, you know, the developer lays out the streets, lays out the building lots, and what's called a plat. And on that plat map, or somewhere else, or somewhere on a deed, are the restrictions on what you can do in the property.
A lot of these are, as you would expect, a house has to be set back from the street a certain number of feet for uniform appearance, no noxious odors, no pigs or swine, no commercial development on a property.
Starting in our region in the 1920s, some developers began adding racial restrictions to these covenants. Typically, these read something like, ‘Only members of the white or Caucasian race may be domiciled in this development.’ Often, they'll have a little codicil to that, so people of color could live in the neighborhood if they were servants of a white person.
We see these restrictions kind of in two ways. There's often the ones [that say] ‘Only the white race.’ Others specify which races may not live in a property.
Often, it will say ‘No Negroes,’ using the terminology of the time. Sometimes, it will say ‘No Chinese.’ We found one that said ‘No Malay or Ethiopian people.’
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that these were unenforceable and unconstitutional. So you could write a housing covenant, but you couldn't enforce it. It was illegal to do so.
The interesting thing is that in Spokane, and really everywhere in the nation, some developers continued to write them right up into the 1950s.
OH: And so what is that research? What does looking for racial covenants look like?
LC: The metaphor of looking for needles in a haystack is very appropriate here. Most property documents from this era did not include racial covenants.
That was, I think, maybe one of our biggest findings. You'll hear people say, well, that was just standard operating procedure back then. It was not.
It was the minority of documents created by people who were racist to maintain white supremacy. But they are out there. And so we went county by county.
First, we looked at the plats. There are hundreds of plat maps for a county as large as Spokane, but not thousands. In most counties, it's a smaller number.
But sometimes, racial covenants can appear on deeds. For the half of the counties that had digital records, we're able to get copies of those digital records. We sent them over to our partners at the University of Washington, and they ran optical character recognition through the electronic deeds and then used crowdsourcing to verify this.
So optical character recognition looked for terms like ‘white’ or ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Negro’ or ‘Malay’ or any of the many, many racial terms of that era.
Now, for the counties that don't have digital records, which is about half of our counties, I hired a bunch of students and loaded them in a van, and we drove out to county courthouses. And we pulled down these 800-page property books, and we read them looking for racial covenants.
Sometimes you go for hours without finding one. Sometimes you find quite a few in a row. It's the most exacting work I've ever been involved in and some of the most satisfying.
OH: Now, specifically for Spokane County, can you talk me through a little bit of the findings?
LC: So part of our job is to inform the public about these racial covenants. At first, we thought, well, every time we find one, we'll send out a letter to the property owner with some indication about what they can do about it. It quickly became apparent this was impractical just from the scale of these.
There are about 7,500 homes in Spokane County impacted by racial covenants. And so we've produced a map of Spokane County showing exactly every property impacted by a racial covenant that we have discovered.
Homeowners or anyone in the public will be able to log in, take a look at the map, zoom in and out, see color-coded which properties have racial covenants. You'll also be able to search by address.
We're also not entirely done with the paper records. Yakima County still has many volumes of paper records that have to be leaked through manually. We have a team in Ellensburg working on that.
OH: So you mentioned you'd originally thought about sending people letters about what they could do. So what are some of the first steps people can take if they look at these maps and realize that their home or their property has one of these covenants?
LC: Well, let me emphasize that this is a property-owner-driven process. They can do nothing. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act ruled racial covenants illegal. It was illegal to write them anymore.
And for a long time, people have just ignored these covenants. They have no legal standing. Why not just ignore it? Increasingly in recent years, though, a lot of folks are just uncomfortable with having that kind of language in the chain of custody for their home, and they want to do something about it.
House Bill 1335 gave homeowners a couple of choices of how to deal with this. One is actually removing it completely, re-recording the deed without the racial covenant. Now, the racial covenant does not get destroyed. We're not erasing history.
It will be filed away separately and, if anything, more available to researchers than it had been in the past, no longer buried among thousands of deeds but singled out.
So the original will still exist for historical purposes, but the legal working copy will no longer contain the racial covenant.
The second option is what I'm calling the ‘strikethrough option,’ and it's basically an additional piece of paper attached to the deed saying, ‘Hey, there's a racial covenant here. It no longer applies.’
But we're going to do a series of public events where we present our map. We'll start here in Spokane and have specialists there to show homeowners how to fill out the paperwork to alter or remove the racial covenant.
We'll roll them out here in Spokane in person. We'll also have web versions of those for people who aren't able to attend.
I should say that a lot of the county auditors are well ahead of us. House Bill 1335 created the means of addressing these racial covenants.
So we hope to roll out a series of public meetings across eastern Washington, maybe one in each county, maybe only in the larger counties that have more of the racial covenants, and continue to issue some press releases and make people aware of our maps and what they can do.
