As Washington grew in the early 20^th century, developers commonly sought to shape the character of new neighborhoods by including covenants (agreements) in deeds for the properties they sold. They might require that only single-family houses be constructed or that buildings be a certain distance from the street. They also might prohibit use of the property as a school, factory, or saloon―or prohibit its sale or lease to certain groups, most often African Americans. 

 

Because deeds are legal contracts, homebuyers needed to pay attention to what they were agreeing to. Buyers who ignored a covenant risked being taken to court, and racial covenants deterred African Americans from moving into new neighborhoods. Covenants also targeted other groups, including Jews. In DC this was more common west of Rock Creek Park.  

 

Starting in the 1920s, racially restrictive covenants also began to be imposed in another manner. Neighborhood associations would gather signatures on petitions that put covenants on the properties of each signer, effectively restricting entire blocks. These petitions, which were filed with the Recorder of Deeds as legal contracts, could restrict whole neighborhoods, like Mount Pleasant and Bloomingdale. Like deed covenants, they sometimes also affected Jews, for example in the neighborhoods around American University.

 

This map shows petition covenants for neighborhoods fully researched as of July 2017: Bloomingdale, Park View, Pleasant Plains, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, and all of the area north of Spring Road. It also includes a scattering of petition covenants for neighborhoods only partially researched thus far, as well as deed covenants placed by landowners and developers, for which research is also ongoing. 

This is the first documented DC case of an African American purchasing a house with a racially restrictive deed covenant. The covenant was placed in the original deeds for houses on this block developed by Ray Middaugh in 1899.

 

After Francis deSales Smith, a black civil engineer, purchased the house in 1907, next-door neighbor Charles Harrison sued to prevent Smith from occupying the house. Contributors to a fund to support the lawsuit included AFL President Samuel Gompers, who lived on the next block. After Mr. Smith succumbed to pressure and sold the house, in August 1908, the suit was dropped.

 

Ray Middaugh’s firm Middaugh & Shannon continued to include racial covenants in deeds for the many houses it developed and sold in Bloomingdale and throughout the city.

This case set a precedent in DC for the courts to enforce racially restrictive covenants placed in deeds by developers. Previously, it had been unclear how these covenants would be enforced. Developers had provided for a monetary penalty (often $2,000) in most of the covenants they wrote, but this decision made the penalty clause unnecessary.

 

The case originated in 1924 when a white couple, Earl and Minnie Torrey, attempted to sell their house to Sereno Ivy, an African American. The house had a racially restrictive covenant placed in the deed by developers Middaugh & Shannon in 1904.

 

Neighbors sued the Torreys and won. “It is apparent that each of the parties to this action, … when they purchased their homes, subjected themselves to the restrictive covenant, not only for their own protection, but upon the assurance that a similar restriction would rest upon all other property embraced in the Middaugh and Shannon Development on Randolph Place,” appellate judge Josiah A. Van Orsdel wrote. 

This landmark case set the precedent nationally for courts to enforce racially restrictive covenants established by groups of neighbors. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, stating it did not have jurisdiction because this was a private contract among property owners.

 

The case originated in 1921, when white households on the block filed a petition covenant prohibiting African Americans from buying or renting their houses. So when an absentee owner who had signed the covenant tried to sell her house to a prominent black doctor and his wife, a neighbor took her to court.

 

In 1923, the DC Supreme Court upheld the covenant, citing the legal segregation of DC schools and recreation facilities as precedents. The DC Appeals Court upheld the ruling: since African Americans were equally free to exclude others, restrictive covenants did not constitute discrimination or a violation of civil rights. 

 

Nonetheless, black demand for these houses was high, and the legal process was not fast enough to prevent African American buyers from moving in. Before long, the neighborhood had changed substantially. (Click on a colored square for more information.)

In the wake of the Corrigan v. Buckley decision upholding the enforceability of petition covenants—by the lower court in 1923, the appeals court in 1924, and U.S. Supreme Court in 1926—the use of petition covenants spread rapidly across Washington.

 

Neighborhood associations organized to write restrictive covenants by petition (and to enforce existing deed covenants), especially on blocks close to where African American families already lived. The petitions bound signers not to sell or rent to African Americans, and sometimes other groups, and were filed with the Recorder of Deeds. Because the petitions were valid for long periods of time—often 21 or 50 years—or even in perpetuity, they also bound future property owners to their terms.

 

This map of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Northwest DC shows the spread of petition covenants in the years just after Corrigan v. Buckley. They kept the neighborhood white well into the 1950s.

 

Residents of Park Road’s 1800 block attempted to enforce a 1927 covenant as late as 1950. They sued African American physician Robert Deane to prevent him from moving into the house he had purchased at 1841 Park Road NW through a “straw” buyer. Learn more about this case here.

 

Conversely, on at least a few DC blocks neighbors organized to nullify racial covenants. For example, residents of Harvard Street in Columbia Heights signed this covenant release in 1931.

This case pitted white owners against each other over whether to enforce racially restrictive covenants in a changing neighborhood. J.D. Grady and five other owners in a group of eight rowhouses wanted to do away with the 30-year-old restriction so they could sell to whomever they wanted in what they saw as an increasingly African American neighborhood.

 

The Garlands and one other owner refused to go along. The court upheld the covenants, stating that they effectively created a “barrier against the eastward movement of colored population into the restricted area.” A dissenting judge argued that the neighborhood had changed to the extent that the covenants no longer met their original purpose and, in fact, had become a burden and should be nullified.

 

(Click on a colored square for more information.)

In Grady v. Garland, profiled above, the DC Appeals Court upheld restrictive covenants as an effective “barrier against the eastward movement of colored population into the restricted area.”

 

This map—showing the location of restricted lots and DC’s black population in 1934―illustrates the use of restrictive covenants to create barriers around majority-black neighborhoods. This pattern was common in other cities as well.

 

Sometimes covenants were abandoned or ignored without legal ramifications, especially before Corrigan v. Buckley established the enforceability of covenants in the courts, in 1926. Between Georgia and Sherman avenues, developers placed racial covenants in deeds along Girard Street and Gresham Place in 1903. The houses remained white-occupied in 1910, but by 1920 all but one household were African-American. Along Harvard Street, Hobart Place, and Columbia Road, developer Harry Wardman built rowhouses in 1912 and sold them as racially restricted. While all but one of them were still white-occupied in 1920, African Americans filled these blocks by 1930.

 

As the 1930s wore on, property owners on some blocks agreed to nullify racial covenants. Neighbors on the 500-600 blocks of Gresham Street signed this agreement.

In this case, the appellate court held that enforcing a 30-year-old deed covenant in a racially changing neighborhood would cause financial hardship for white homeowners who wanted to sell to the highest bidder.

 

The case originated in 1941 when an African American couple, Frederick and Mary Hundley, bought a house subject to a racially restrictive covenant placed by the developer in 1910. Although another black family already lived on the block and many lived nearby, neighbors sued the Hundleys and won, forcing them to move out. A year later the Hundleys won on appeal and returned to the house, which they had rented out in the interim.

 

Appellate judge Lawrence Groner rejected the Hundleys’ argument that “the covenant constitutes an undue and unlawful restraint” on real estate dealings; various courts had already established their legality. But Groner acknowledged that courts had refused to uphold them when “enforcing the covenant would merely depreciate all the property in the block without accomplishing the purpose which originally impelled its making.” Although the Hundleys were only the second African American family on their block, the court recognized the complexion of Columbia Heights was changing. (Click on a colored square for more information.) Attorney Charles Houston used this map to make his case for the Hundleys.

The battle to eliminate racial covenants in DC largely took place along a racial dividing line in Bloomingdale, and especially near the intersection of First and Adams Streets NW. Developers Ray Middaugh and William Shannon built rowhouses there beginning in 1899, and restricted them to whites only. However, by 1941 the surrounding blocks were almost exclusively black.

 

In the late 1920s, African Americans bought at least five restricted houses on the 100 block of Adams. Neighbors sued, and the courts enforced the covenants, nullifying deeds and forcing black owners to vacate. Whites were left with houses they could not legally sell to African Americans in a neighborhood where other whites no longer wanted to buy.

 

By 1941, an Italian American real estate agent, Raphael Urciolo, had purchased several of the restricted houses along Adams as well as on Bryant, one block north, and begun selling them to black buyers. Urciolo worked with NAACP attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, who prepared a petition to nullify the covenants that was signed by a number of white residents. But two white homeowners refused to sign, and the court upheld the covenants.

 

By this time, almost no whites actually lived on Adams Street. But racial covenants prevented whites from renting or selling to African Americans, who were willing to pay premium prices for houses. A map made by Houston in January 1942 shows just how stark the racial divide was here. Green indicates white-occupied houses with covenants; pink is used for black-occupied houses with covenants; and brown designates black-occupied houses without covenants.

 

 

This case, which upheld a racially restrictive covenant, was noteworthy for the dissent by appellate court judge Henry W. Edgerton. The covenant should not apply in this case because housing conditions in the city had changed and an acute housing emergency existed for the “187,000 Negroes in the District of Columbia,” he wrote.

 

The case went twice to the appeals court because of Mays’s continued failure to vacate the house when she couldn’t find another place for her family of nine. The court upheld the covenant, rejecting the argument that “the character of the neighborhood had changed" and that black DC residents faced a housing shortage. These issues, the ruling stated, “were not sufficient to justify the abrogation of the rule of law which this court had applied consistently in similar cases over a period of twenty-five years.” Real estate agent Raphael Urciolo, who often financed home purchases for his African American clients, found Ms. Mays another house.

 

(Click on a colored square for more information.)

 

NAACP attorney Charles Hamilton Houston argued Hurd v. Hodge before the U.S. Supreme Court. (Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)

 

When James and Mary Hurd, an African American couple, bought 116 Bryant Street in 1944, neighbors sued. The court cancelled their deed because the racial covenant it contained meant the purchase was illegal. In addition, the neighbors sued the Hurds’ real estate agent, Raphael Urciolo, who had also sold other covenanted houses on the block to African Americans. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Hurd v. Hodge and Urciolo v. Hodge as part of a group of four restrictive covenant cases. Charles Hamilton Houston, chairman of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Committee, represented the Hurds and Urciolo before the Supreme Court.

 

The courts had upheld covenants for decades, but by 1948 the tide was turning. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights had recently recommended they be eliminated, and the U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief with the Court opposing them. Thurgood Marshall―special counsel to the NAACP and Houston’s former student―argued a Detroit case heard as part of the group. Shelley v. Kraemer, from St. Louis, was the fourth case and the one by which the Court’s landmark decision is known.

 

The Court ruled that courts could no longer enforce racially restrictive covenants based on the 14th Amendment, which requires states to treat all their citizens equally under the law. Because DC is not a "state" and therefore not necessarily subject to the 14th Amendment, Hurd v. Hodge was decided based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In addition, the court said, "enforcement of restrictive covenants in these cases is ... contrary to the public policy of the United States."

 

The ruling also recognized that restrictive covenants were private contracts and affirmed the right of private parties to write and voluntarily abide by them.

After the Supreme Court ruled racial covenants unenforceable in 1948, previously restricted blocks opened up to black buyers—some quickly and some more gradually. But the real estate and banking industries continued to enforce segregation, even if the courts did not.

 

Census data from 1930, mapped on the right, show just how hemmed in African Americans were. Census maps from 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970 , show how quickly they claimed space that was formerly off limits.

 

These maps also illustrate whites’ response to the legal desegregation of housing, public facilities, and finally schools in 1954. As new suburbs beckoned, many moved west of Rock Creek Park or left the city altogether. Two years after the 1968 uprising that followed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, it was clear that even as African American homeseekers pushed beyond old geographic boundaries, residential segregation had become entrenched.

Mapping Segregation in Washington DC is a public history project documenting the historic segregation of DC’s housing, along with its schools, recreation facilities, and other public spaces. The project launched in January 2014 and thus far has focused on racially restrictive housing covenants, mainly in DC’s Northwest neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park, as well as on legal challenges to covenants. As of July 2017, the project had documented racial covenants on approximately 10,000 properties.

 

Real estate documents filed between 1921 and 1948 are available in the DC Recorder of Deeds’ publicly accessible database, while those filed earlier remain in their original form, in volumes housed at the DC Archives. 

 

The source of our block-level demographic data is a map developed by the Works Progress Administration for the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. Decennial census data showing racial composition of DC census tracts come from the Minnesota Population Center's National Historical Geographic Information System.

 

We gathered information on legal cases from various sources: the Charles Hamilton Houston Papers at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, contemporary newspapers via Proquest, and the Records of the U.S. District and Other Courts in the District of Columbia housed at the National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks go to Robert Ellis at NARA for his assistance in finding those cases.

 

The project uses ArcGIS software and publicly available geospatial data provided by DC GIS to map properties with racial covenants. Using GIS to map historic properties means that in some cases the displayed data show covenants attached to buildings that no longer exist, or on lots with boundaries that do not precisely match those of current lots.

 

This project was organized by Prologue DC and Brian Kraft of JMT Technology Group, who made this story map. Humanities DC provided funding to support research assistance by several interns, including students from the University of the District of Columbia.

 

Carol Rose, Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization at Yale University and co-author of the book Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (2013), and Valerie Schneider, Assistant Professor of Law and supervisor of the Fair Housing Clinic at Howard University School of Law, generously agreed to review the text of this story map prior to its online launch. We gratefully acknowledge, and have incorporated, the critical feedback they provided.

 

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