Racial Covenants

What Do Racial Covenants Look Like?

According to the National Covenants Research Coalition, covenants come in a variety of forms:

•  Plat restrictions, established by a real estate developer from the time a subdivision was laid out

• Agreements, signed by residents in a neighborhood, never to sell, lease, or allow occupancy by someone who was not Caucasian, then filed with the county recorder of deeds. 

• Private block restrictions on a small enclave within a city. 

• A short clause within a deed document, where the restriction or covenant language was embedded in every deed document when the property was transferred.

How Do You Find Them?

There are several ways to find covenants and racial restrictions:

• Land records kept by your county (or county-equivalent) clerk or recorder of deeds. 

  • Digitized Land Records: available over the web or at a computer terminal in the recorder’s office.

  • Analog Land Records: Old covenants (mostly pre-1948) are largely kept with analog documents that were never digitized. In that case, you must learn how they are stored and work through the archive to find them. 

• In almost every community, you may need to do some background research of any existing studies to find out what neighborhoods the covenants were in, or were most likely to have been in.