This map shows areas of Raleigh and Wake County (in red) with racially restricted covenants. (Photo: Wake County Register of Deeds)
Lisa Boccetti and Bob Williams beamed with pride as they shared the culmination of a year’s-long work to identify Wake County deeds that contain racially restrictive covenants. The covenants shaped city and county housing patterns and led Raleigh to grow into what has been described as an “intentionally segregated city.”
The married couple of more than 40 years and a small army of volunteers combed through more than 600,000 pages of documents from the Register of Deeds database, covering 1900 to around 1950 for the county’s “Racially Restrictive Covenants Project.” Using artificial intelligence (AI) to help sift through the documents, the volunteers eventually found nearly 15,000 deeds with racially restrictive covenants.
Such covenants were written into deeds of homes in certain neighborhoods to prohibit their sale to buyers who were Black or non-white.
“Racially restrictive covenants are only one item in a whole toolbox of strategies that were used over many years in the U.S., to limit access to capital, property and generational wealth building for people of color,” Boccetti said. “Zoning, school placement, urban redevelopment, redlining, real estate steering, all were a part of that effort.”
The deed on Boccetti’s and Williams’ 1950s-era ranch house in Raleigh has a racially restrictive covenant that states the land cannot be sold or occupied by Black people.
In a 2023 interview with Stateline, the couple told a reporter that they would like to remove the offensive language, which hasn’t been legally binding for more than half a century. North Carolina, however, doesn’t have a process to do so. In 2021, two state senators filed legislation to give homeowners a way to erase such covenants, but the bill was sent to a committee and died, Stateline reported.
“It’s infuriating, because unless your state has a process in place through legislation to remove or repudiate the contract, there’s nothing you can do to make it go away,” Boccetti told the news outlet, which like NC Newsline is a part of States Newsroom.
Wake County government responds
Tammy Brunner, the Wake County Register of Deeds, asked Boccetti to take on the Racially Restrictive Covenant Project after the Wake County Enslaved Persons Project was completed. Boccetti, who worked on that project, asked Williams to design an interactive map for the racially restrictive covenant project after Brunner said she wanted one.
The Enslaved Persons Project was a collaborative effort by the University of North Carolina Greensboro Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, Wake County Register of Deeds and Shaw University, that uncovered hidden information and stories about formerly enslaved people from hundreds of pages of Wake County deed books.
Brunner said she was eager to see what the deeds from racially restrictive covenants would show about the impact discriminatory policies have had on underserved communities in Wake County.
“I just believed strongly that these covenants, once we pulled them all out and mapped them out, that what we would learn is that…we created these underserved parts of Wake County,” Brunner said. “They’re the same underserved parts of Wake County that were created back in the early 1900s.”
County Commissioner Vice Chairman Don Mial, a Wake County native, said he’s old enough to have experienced the racial discrimination that was once prevalent in the county.
Mial noted that Black people could not visited certain parks or swim in certain public pools when he was a child. There were also certain parts of Wake County that Black people referred to as “sundown” towns or areas because they knew they could not be in them after certain times, he said.
“This new catalogue of the county’s racially restrictive covenants will help us connect those experiences with the policies that produced those types of situations,” Mial said.
The legacy of racism
Williams said one impact of the covenants is that the properties in the most prized areas of the county could only be owned by whites for nearly 60 years.
“Raleigh [Wake County] was a very small city, a town basically, in 1939 and it grew explosively after that but all of this money, all of this growth, was concentrated in these covenanted areas,” Williams said. “Those were the only places you could get loans for, you could get a mortgage for, to buy homes in those areas.”
The first racially restrictive covenant in the U.S. appeared in 1843 in Massachusetts, Boccetti shared during an event this week at the Wake County Justice Center to celebrate the work of the volunteers. It was in the “Linden Place” development, the same “neck of the wood where many prominent abolitionists like the Grimke sisters and Frederick Douglass lived,” she said.
“So, covenants are not unique to Raleigh or Wake County or North Carolina or even the South,” Boccetti said. “They are nationwide.”
Because North Carolina was a slave state, Boccetti said she did not believe there was reason to look for restrictive covenants before emancipation in 1863. The volunteers started there and found the first racially restrictive covenant in 1905.
“We stopped in 1950, because in 1948, there was a Supreme Court ruling called Shelley v. Kraemer that forbade the enforcement of these covenants.”
But even then, Boccetti said, the enforcement of such covenants didn’t stop. In 1949, the U.S. Attorney General pulled Federal Housing Administration funding from mortgages on properties with racially restrictive covenants.
The volunteers found deeds from 1948 to 1950 that were “really quite defiant” because property owners didn’t need FHA funds to purchase homes.
“If you think about it, if you’ve got your own financing or you’re a cash buyer, you really don’t care about the FHA financing,” Boccetti said. “It was only gradually that the documents kind of slacked off.”
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 into law after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The federal law prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, and disability. The law essentially makes it illegal to deny housing to someone based on these protected characteristics.
Reading through some deeds was difficult due to the language, Boccetti said.
“The language was ugly, the intent was ugly, the result is ugly and reading it can be quite painful,” Boccetti said.
Here is what a 1906 deed transferring a home on Blount Street in Raleigh from the Glenwood Land Company to Annie M. Wiggins said about restricting access to “negroes or persons of negro blood”:
The homes of some of Wake County’s most prominent citizens included racially restrictive covenants in the deeds, the volunteers found.
Boccetti noted that Clarence Poe, an editor and publisher who established Long View Gardens in southeast Raleigh, had racially restrictive covenants in all of the deeds for the development. The covenants restrictive people Poe deemed “unacceptable people he calls not holy Caucasians,” she said.
“He limits the residents of his development to English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, Belgian, Scandinavian,” Boccetti said. “So, that means he’s not hospitable to not only people of color but no problem, no Greek, no Middle Eastern, no Indian, no one from Mexico or South America, no one who doesn’t make his explicit list.”
A community project
Boccetti said that around 200 people answered the initial call for volunteers to work on the project. The group included law students from N.C. Central University in Durham and an entire history class from N.C. State University, she said.
The level of response the couple received when they asked for community volunteers “speak to a real hunger to understand the forces that have shaped us and to use that knowledge going forward to guide us through issues we face in Raleigh and Wake County,” she said.
The volunteers’ work will help Wake County residents understand the past and present and guide them into the future, Boccetti said. The covenants tell Wake County’s story in a “unique and nuanced way,” Boccetti said.
“It really is a different perspective, I think, not part of the usual narrative about Raleigh being a lovely, comfortable place, a beacon of hope and opportunity for the whole state,” Boccetti said. “We can see from the data that for a very long time, issues of race and class have separated us from one another, a result of the white supremacist worldview that mandated absolute separation of the races and was espoused by Wake County’s leaders for many, many years.”