- With the help of more than 6,000 volunteers, two UWM researchers mapped racially restricted covenants across Milwaukee County.
- The new map allows the public to search for covenants by address or zoom in on specific blocks.
- The researchers would like to finish the project by exploring community resistance to the covenants.
Most of Milwaukee County’s racially restrictive housing covenants were put in place in the 1920s, a time when few Black people lived there. By the 1930s, there were three times as many racial covenants in the county as there were Black residents living there. The covenants applied to single homes, subdivisions, some riverfront properties’ water and ice, even cemeteries.
These were among several surprising findings that came out of an ongoing mapping project by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors Anne Bonds and Derek Handley. They presented their findings to more than 130 people during a Nov. 8 event at Milwaukee Central Library.
Racially restrictive covenants contained language in property deeds that prevented the sale of land or homes to Black people and people of other ethnicities. They were in place for decades across America to keep certain areas exclusively white, including in many Milwaukee suburbs.
The covenants help explain Milwaukee County’s low rate of Black suburbanization and its deep segregation. The professors, for example, found a strong band of covenants on the city’s northwest side. After the Fair Housing Act outlawed covenants in 1968, white populations moved out of the city, helping explain the Black population’s growth in that area.
“We want to underscore the fact that racial segregation is not something that just happens” said Bonds, a professor of geography and urban studies. “(It) was written into our neighborhoods..”
Racially restricted covenant map is searchable by address
Bonds and Handley received nearly five million images of Milwaukee County deeds between 1910 and 1960. They trained about 5,000 volunteers to comb through the data and record covenants. Five people examined each deed to ensure accuracy.
Altogether, it took about 2-1/2 years to identify and transcribe roughly 32,500 covenants. The map is housed on a public-facing website in the hopes other researchers, community organizations and lawmakers take advantage of the new resource.
Although the map in its current state is very comprehensive, Bonds and Handley noted that some properties
The map allows users to zoom in on a specific block, search by address and read the exact language included in an particular covenants. Users can see how the covenants grew across the county over time and how they connect with later forms of discrimination.
The federal goverment color-coded maps designating Black and minority neighborhoods that were risky for mortgage lending through a practice known as redlining. The UWM project identified instances where highly-graded, white areas were referenced as “restricted neighborhoods” as a way to capture the existing covenants.
Bonds and Handley noticed a pattern of new, highly sought-after neighborhoods, at the time, implementing the racial covenants. In some cases, a covenant existed to cover an entire neighborhood that hadn’t been built yet.
Some covenants contained language indicating the ban would be in place for perpetuity. Other covenants spanned a century. Most common were covenants covering 25 to 30 years, or about how long one generation stays in a home.
“They were designed to control the racial makeup of a generation,” Bonds said. “Dehumanizing scripts that remain in property records… tell us about the (racial) architecture here in Milwaukee.”
What language was included in Milwaukee County covenants?
Volunteers were astonished by the language in some of the deeds, referring to Black people as “colored,” “African” or lumped into paragraphs banning cows and pigs from a property. In some cases, covenants allowed a person of color to live on the property — but only if they lived there as a domestic servant.
Some deeds targeted other groups, such as Italians, Mexican-Americans or non-citizens.
Anna Mohr, who went through some of the documents during a social inequity college course, said she was horrified to see that some racial and anti-immigrant covenants were listed amongst non-human requirements for property purchase.
“I think that’s really relevant today, because this country is terrified of immigrants,” Mohr said.
Volunteer transcriber Heather Godley said she thinks this is history that was deliberately hidden and said the covenants are valuable based on the the ability it gives the public to see how the covenants still affect us on an everyday basis.
“If you look at maps of health outcomes and food deserts, a lot of it is overlaid with what we see in these (racial covenant) maps today,” Godley said. “I think this has huge implications for understanding our current inequities today and gives us some ways to move forward…”
The restrictions did more than prevent a person from renting or buying a property, Handley said. It limited their access to the best neighborhoods, parks and schools.
Researchers in other cities have embarked on similar mapping projects but Milwaukee’s stood out in several ways, such as the majority of covenants beginning in the 1920s and so many covenants in place in neighborhoods that today are predominanantly Black, Bonds said. The number of covenants banning people of color from being buried in certain cemeteries was also unique to Milwaukee.
Trump administration cut grant for UWM racial covenant project before completion
The National Endowment for the Humanities cut the professors’ $150,000 grant earlier this year, months before the project’s end. It was one of hundreds of diversity-related research projects axed by the Trump administration.
Just over half of the grant had been used before the grant’s termination. The postdoc fellow working on the project was laid off and three graduate students lost part-time work.
Handley and Bonds estimated this summer they need about $30,000 to finish the project. They had planned to produce a much more interactive website, as well as a podcast series interviewing volunteers who worked on the project and relatives of family members who experienced housing discrimination.
The professors also want to map the history of resistance to the covenants by Black people, their allies and organizations such as the NAACP. Bonds explained the need for housing was acute, and the areas where Black people were living were filled with dilapidated houses.
“We’re looking to finish that other side of the story, which we see as equally and significantly important,” Bonds said.
To donate, visit www.give.uwm.edu/MappingRR.
Kelly Meyerhofer has covered higher education in Wisconsin since 2018. Contact her at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com or 414-223-5168. Follow her on X (Twitter) at @KellyMeyerhofer.
