Racial Restrictive Covenants Project: December 2024 Updates
Record-Breaking Volunteer Participation!
The Covenants Project recently collaborated with the law firm David Wright Tremaine LLP and the Amazon legal team to teach legal professionals about the history of racially restrictive covenants and other forms of housing discrimination in Washington state. These teams then assisted the project by reviewing documents on our volunteer research platform, Zooniverse.
Between Nov. 13 and 14, these volunteers reviewed over 6,000 documents and our number of registered volunteers now exceeds 1,700. Since then, Zooniverse volunteers have reviewed over 7,000 documents in the past week.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our project through Zooniverse. We appreciate all the time and effort you’ve spent to advance our research!
To join others in contributing to this ground-breaking history project, check out the Volunteer page on our website and register for Zooniverse. Volunteers can also earn service hours with us. Email wacovenants@gmail.com with proof of your volunteer time, and we will happily sign off on hours.
Samples of Restrictive Covenants By Neighborhood Now Available
We are now publishing copies of original documents containing racially restrictive covenants for historically restricted subdivisions on our website. You can now view scans of restrictions from these counties:
The list is ordered by city, and clicking on the name of the subdivision will take you to a PDF containing an example of a document with a covenant in that subdivision (either a deed for a single property or a declaration of covenants that applies to the whole of or a significant portion of the subdivision) and a map of the subdivision.
We are currently working on creating sample documents for King County. If you are searching for property records in King County, please see the King County Archives for assistance.
Archival Research Update
For the past several weeks, project manager Amanda Miller and research associate Sophie Belz have been traveling to the Washington State Archives in Olympia to research racial restrictive covenants in Mason County, a mid-sized county bordering the southwest of the Puget Sound and including part of the Olympic National Forest.
So far, they have:
Looked through over 100 volumes of property deeds between the 1920s and 1960s
Found around 1,600 restricted properties in 30 subdivisions
Project Director James Gregory Awarded John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice
The American Historical Association awarded Covenants Project director Dr. James Gregory the John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice.
The award is granted for his decadeslong work researching and educating on the history of segregation in Seattle and Washington state and establishing and heading the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project since 2005.
Congratulations!
The Covenants Homeownership Program In Action
On July 1, the Washington State Housing Finance Commission officially launched the Covenant Homeownership Program. A down payment assistance program for low-income families impacted by the state’s history of racially restrictive covenants and other forms of housing discrimination.
Since then, the Covenant Homeownership Program has aided 117 households in purchasing homes! There are currently 50 more households in the process of acquiring down payment assistance through the program. About a third of beneficiaries purchased homes in King County, a third in Pierce County, and another third in other parts of the state.
This is all despite the program facing legal challenges from the conservative advocacy group, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
The foundation argues that the program violates some homebuyers’ constitutional rights by limiting who qualifies for the program to certain racial groups impacted by historical housing discrimination. This requirement, and others, are based on a comprehensive study completed by the National Fair Housing Alliance that the Covenants Project contributed to with our data and expertise.
To learn about the Covenant Homeownership Program, check out the program’s website. Homebuyers can access the Covenant program, as well as other financial help and support, via the state Homeownership Hotline: 877-894-4663
To read more about the legal challenge, check out this article by the Seattle Times.
To learn more about the history of racially restrictive covenants in Washington state, check out the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project website, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram.
The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project is committed to discovering and teaching about the history of housing discrimination in Washington state. The project conducts outreach events for various organizations from corporations to churches to community groups to schools. To coordinate an event with the project, contact the project via email: wacovenants@gmail.com.