Racial Restrictive Covenants Project: Recent Project Updates
Hello Everyone,
The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project would like to thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and for volunteering your time on Zooniverse! Thus far we have had 620 people volunteer on Zooniverse, and they have classified over 11,141 documents! Thank you all so much for contributing to this work. We couldn’t do it without you.
Here are some project updates:
Our team is growing! We have recently hired Alvin Bui as our Project Director. Alvin is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington in modern Southeast Asian and East Asian History, with interests in Cold War Asia, migration, and diaspora studies. We have also hired two new undergraduate students as research associates - Erin Miller and Sam Cutts. Erin is a Senior at the University of Washington majoring in Law, Societies, and Justice, and Sam is also a Senior at the University of Washington majoring in history and international studies. If you would like to learn more about them and our other team members please visit our website!
Since the most recent phase our project began in June 2021, we had been hoping to go to the King County Archive Building to get a chance to look through some of King County’s non-digitized records. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the Archives remodel timeline, we had been unable to go to the archive building. Fortunately, last month the wonderful people at the King County Archives allowed us early access to the building and we have been working there in person twice a week. This has been significant for our project because having access to these non-digitized files allows us to continue our search for racial restrictions in King County.
As a project, we initially thought that developers and owners of property in Washington stopped including restrictions in their deeds around the 1950s. Recently though, we have found racial restrictive covenants in Snohomish and Pierce County going into the 1960s! This has been a significant finding because the 1960s were a decade in which we did not expect to find racial restrictive covenants. This finding has prompted us to continue our search for restrictions into the 1960s in other counties as we continue this work!
We have added more Snohomish documents to Zooniverse, allowing for volunteers to be able to work in either the King County, Snohomish County, or Spokane County modules.
For the time being, we have stopped doing weekly Zooniverse transcription sessions. As you work on Zooniverse, if you have any questions feel free to use the Talk Board on the Zooniverse website, or send us an email at wacovenants@gmail.com. We are available for questions and eager to help!
We have recently partnered with the City of Shoreline and the Shoreline Historical Museum to hold an event for Shoreline Community members. The event will include a presentation about our local segregation story and will conclude with a Zooniverse transcription session! This event will be held over Zoom on September 13th from 6:30 to 8pm. We will send a link to register for the event in the coming weeks.
If you are able, please spread the word about this volunteer opportunity to anyone you think may be interested! We are always looking for more volunteers and have several counties uploaded to Zooniverse for volunteers to work through. We have also been reaching out to various community organizations and churches to see if they would be interested in learning more about our project and participating in our research through Zooniverse. If you know of a community organization that would be interested in something like this please let us know, we would be happy to connect with them!
Thank you again for taking the time to read this email and for supporting our project!
All the best,
Jazzlynn Woods (Senior Research Associate, Racial Restrictive Covenants Project)
Learn More About the Project:
Racial Restrictive Covenants Project Website
Learn About Volunteering Here!
Racial Restrictive Covenant Zooniverse Page
