Method Used to Map Racially Restrictive Covenants in Washtenaw County

Prepared by Robert Goodspeed and the Justice InDeed team

In Washtenaw County, we have found two types of racially restrictive covenants in the property records: those within property deeds, and those that apply to entire subdivisions. This page describes how we are working to identify and map both types of covenants.

Covenants in Deeds

We know some properties in Washtenaw County include racially restrictive covenants within deeds or other legal documents that apply to an individual property. However, finding these individual covenants is difficult since it requires reviewing all documents in the Register of Deeds archives. We are collaborating with the Mapping Prejudice organization in Minneapolis to replicate their method for finding them. This process involves scanning the images of all property records with optical character recognition (OCR) software, and using volunteers to review and transcribe the covenants through the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse. Stay tuned for more information about how to be involved. In the meantime, if you are aware that the deed for your property contains a covenant, you can submit it to us by emailing us at justiceindeedmi (at) umich.edu. We will use submitted deeds with covenants as educational resources, and also to ensure the quality of our automated process.

Covenants in Subdivision Restrictions

Background

In Washtenaw County, most homes built in the 20th Century were constructed within new neighborhoods created through subdivisions (also called plats). When a piece of land, such as a farm, is converted into a residential neighborhood it is typically done through a subdivision, a legal process to create new individual lots. Subdivisions are registered with a county register of deeds. To create a subdivision, property owners were required to submit a map showing the lots being created, which is typically accompanied by a document describing restrictions and regulations which apply to all of the lots in the subdivision.

In Washtenaw County, developers frequently added racially restrictive covenants to the list of other restrictions on the use of property when subdivisions were created. Other common covenants included setback requirements for houses, prohibitions on using the land for industrial purposes, and bans on fraternities and fences. Through the use of records provided to us by the Washtenaw County Register of Deeds and Liberty Title Company, we were able to systematically search through the records associated with all subdivisions developed from 1910-1968, the period when racially restrictive covenants were placed on property in Washtenaw County.

To do this, we first needed a list of all subdivisions developed during this period, and the dates they were created. The Register of Deeds provided scanned images of typewritten sheets containing all these subdivisions, which we entered into a database. Next, we utilized a combination of Register of Deeds documents and “plat files” provided to us by the Liberty Title Company to search for racially restrictive covenants. To facilitate researching property records, the title industry maintains their own files that contain copies of public records. Within their files, the racial covenants were blacked out in the 1960s, making them easy to identify without reading through every document. The title company files are also organized by subdivision name, unlike the county records which have incomplete subdivision indexing. At this stage, we first searched the Liberty Title files for each subdivision, and if we found a blacked out provision, we looked up the document in the Register of Deed’s system. Some subdivisions were missing from the title company records, and for those we searched the county system directly. After finding the document with the covenant, we recorded the specific language of the covenant into our database. We then linked this data with spatial data containing subdivision boundaries provided to use by Washtenaw County GIS.

Results

We started our search of subdivisions developed in 1900, which is earlier than racially restrictive covenants were commonly used. The first subdivision we found with a racially restrictive covenant was Ardmore Gardens in Pittsfield Township from 1912, which stated that “This land shall never be occupied by a colored person.” In 1914, properties in Eastover Hills in Pittsfield Township contained covenants stating “"Said land shall not be sold to or occupied by any colored person". In 1916, the first covenant for a subdivision in the City of Ann Arbor, Killen's Heights Addition to the City of Ann Arbor contained the following provision, "Said premises shall at not time be used or occupied for manufacturing purposes, nor by a colored person or persons for any purpose." We found five additional racially restrictive covenants established before the early 1920s, when their use became widespread, appearing in the documents for roughly half of all subdivisions during this period in the County. They continued to be used throughout the 30s and 40s. The use of racially restrictive covenants declined in Washtenaw County following the 1948 United States Supreme Court’s landmark case of Shelley v. Kramer, which held that courts would no longer enforce racial covenants. We found six subdivisions with them from the years 1949-1952, after which developers and homeowners in Washtenaw County stopped adding them to the deeds of new homes with one exception. We continued our search all the way to 1972, and found only one additional subdivision, Starwick Heights #3, that was created in 1970 with a racial covenant.

Within the City of Ann Arbor, our data show 31,753 parcels. Among those, from our preliminary map data, 3,493 (or 11%) are located within subdivisions that have racially restrictive covenants.

Across Washtenaw County, we have identified 121 subdivisions that have racially restrictive covenants, and these can be divided into two main types:

• 109 restrict sale or use of the property to “Caucasian” or “White” buyers only

• 12 restrict the sale or use of property to “Colored” or “African” people

Of these 121 subdivisions, eight combine one of the two types of restrictions above with additional restrictions, most of which prohibit sale or use of properties to Jewish people or restrict properties to “Gentiles” only. All of the subdivisions with these additional restrictions were developed on properties located on lakes in the county.

This work has produced two maps. One map shows subdivisions with racially restrictive covenants in the City of Ann Arbor, and three surrounding townships: Scio Township, Pittsfield Township, and Ann Arbor Township. We have also created an online map showing all subdivisions with racially restrictive covenants in the County.