Property owners in Washington County can now learn if their property ever had a racial covenant — a clause in a property deed that barred people who were not white from owning homes or land for the first half of the 20th century.
The properties are marked on a new online map from Mapping Prejudice, an ongoing University of Minnesota Libraries research project working to expose structural racism.
So far, researchers have mapped 438 properties with racial covenants in the county, and the work is continuing, said Dave Brandt, the county’s geospatial systems architect, who has been working with the U of M researchers.
While the U.S. Supreme Court made racial covenants legally unenforceable in 1948, many sellers continued to add them to properties after that date, said Michael Corey, technical lead for Mapping Prejudice. They were made fully illegal nationwide by the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
Acknowledging the racial covenants and the wrongs they inflicted is the first step toward reversing wealth gaps around the country, Corey said.
Covenants were put on properties “to attract white buyers,” he said. “They were seen as a selling point. It was an amenity, a new technology that they said would make your neighborhood better.”
Mapping Prejudice, which was started in 2016, has uncovered more than 35,000 racial covenants to date in Minnesota, he said. The earliest one found so far is from 1910.
Racial covenants and other tools “shut people out from generations of wealth-building,” Corey said.
“Now that discrimination is theoretically illegal, we’re not all starting from the same place,” he said. “We’re starting from a place where some people have had 100 years of investment in their neighborhoods. They’ve gone to college, they’ve been able to retire. Other people are on the opposite end of that, where maybe they were only able to live in a neighborhood that had a freeway next to it or was redlined, and they weren’t able to get a loan and maybe didn’t have access to college. Some people are starting in a hole while other people were given a huge leg up.”
Mapped homes
The properties that have been mapped to date in Washington County appear with detailed descriptions of the racially restrictive covenants, the addresses and the dates they were added.
Among them are homes on North Shore Circle in Forest Lake, homes along the shore of Bone Lake in Scandia and homes scattered throughout Oakdale, St. Paul Park, Lake St. Croix Beach and St. Mary’s Point. There also are a few in Lakeland and one in Newport.
About 45 homes built between Lake Demontreville and Lake Olson in the Tri-Lake neighborhood of Lake Elmo contain racial covenants. Most of the racial covenants were placed in 1925; another dozen or so were added in 1951.
Many of the covenants in that area of Lake Elmo state that “the said property shall not … be conveyed or leased to, or occupied or used by, any other person or persons than those of the white Caucasian race, but this provision shall not be construed to prevent the occupation of said property by persons of other races, where they are employed as servants.”
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Washington County commissioners in June 2021 approved an agreement with the University of Minnesota Libraries giving researchers bulk access to property-record images free of charge for deeds filed from 1910 to 1968.
After they received images of the microfilmed property records from Washington County, volunteers fed the images through optical-character-recognition software to screen for racist language, Corey said. Anything the software flagged was then reviewed, he said.
If volunteers found a racist covenant, they then transcribed the text of the covenant and recorded the date, the name of the buyer, the name of the seller and the physical description of the property.
Shocked to learn
The covenants are never removed from the history of the deed, but they can be discharged, Corey said.
“We don’t actually want to redact the historical record,” he said. “But when you discharge your covenant, it actually puts another note in the stack of files associated with the property that says, ‘There was a covenant. Here’s where it was, and we disavow that.’”
“We think it’s really important that we don’t erase the evidence of racial covenants,” he said. “The only reason that we can find these now and map them and have these conversations is because they were preserved as part of the historical record. Sometimes I think people would just prefer that this history was gone, but in the past, that has meant that people have avoided talking about this history and pretending it didn’t happen.”
A woman who owns one of the houses in Lake Elmo said she was shocked to learn her deed includes a clause that once prohibited any non-white person from buying or renting it. She and her husband, who bought the house in 2010, plan to contact the Washington County’s property records department and begin the process of having the covenant discharged, she said.
There is no charge to do so, thanks to a law passed by the Minnesota Legislature earlier this year, Corey said.
“A lot of people have found discharging their covenants really meaningful and important, and we support that,” he said. “We also say that that needs to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a conversation. Now that we know that this was here, what are we going to do about it? Discharging your covenant does not undo the damage that was done by that covenant being there for 50 years.”
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Racial covenants info, talk
Anyone who wants to have a racial covenant discharged in Washington County should contact the County Recorder’s Office at 651-430-6175 or recorder@washingtoncountymn.gov or stop by the front desk at the Washington County Government Center in Stillwater. There is no fee.
Dave Brandt will present a Tea Talk on the Mapping Prejudice project from 5-6 p.m. Friday at the Washington County Historic Courthouse in Stillwater. Registration is $15 at WashingtonCountyMN.gov/ParksPrograms (search for “Tea Talk”).
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