We attended a session by the Mapping Prejudice Project at the EQS Symposium on May 18th. Background: Mapping Prejudice Project identifies and maps racial covenants in partnership with communities across the state of Minnesota and the nation. Racial covenants are clauses— a couple of lines of text— that were embedded into property deeds to keep people who were not white from buying or occupying homes. The project, which is continuing, has been creating a map of the Twin Cities that shows all the covenanted properties. Check it out at Maps & Data. Some details that stood out to us:
- The project to map racial covenants began as an experiment at the University of Minnesota in 2016.
- The covenants were nothing less than racism backed by institutional control, and they limited the opportunity for non-white families to develop generational wealth and a higher quality of life.
- While reading covenants and collecting data, volunteers of Mapping Prejudice have had a space to learn and share the truth about covenants, which has had the powerful result of producing positive change.
- The oldest covenant found in the Twin Cities is dated 1910, when the cities were mostly integrated. By 1940, the covenants had transformed the cities into the segregated areas we are currently familiar with.
- Racial covenants have been illegal nationwide since the passage of The Fair Housing Act in 1968, and even though they are no longer enforced, most are still on the property deeds.
- Just Deeds is a coalition of cities in Minnesota working to discharge racial covenants from property deeds. The term discharge is used to convey that while racial covenants will be removed from property deeds, the goal is not to destroy or hide evidence of racial covenants. Learn more about the City of Saint Paul's work in the Just Deeds Initiative here.
--May V. and Terrie M.
