The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Whites-only rules still on land records
Julie Davis and her husband found what they thought was the perfect getaway: a cute, 520square-foot cottage on a lake.
The price was right, but when the Southington couple’s lawyer was ready to finalize the deal, a remnant of Connecticut’s racist past jumped out at them: “No portion of this said premises shall be conveyed or leased to any other than the Caucasian Race,” the deed reads.
Julie, a state employee, and her husband Peter, who are both white, were appalled and nearly rejected the sale. “It’s sad and sickening and disturbing,” she said. While they went ahead with the purchase, they want to possibly wipe out the offending line in the deed to their new summer place in the Moodus section of East Haddam.
It’s an indelible part of Connecticut’s history, when neighborhood associations and even entire subdivisions were “whites only,” until federal law overruled the tactic of restrictive covenants in property deals to exclude minorities.
Such restrictions were common throughout the state even after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of 1948. Now, more scholars and interested citizens are discovering the state’s racist past.
Restrictive covenants are buried deep inside historic property documents in city and town halls throughout the state. And while the language has virtually no legal effect, they remain provocative evidence of discrimination that lingers in the state’s predominantly white suburbs and housing discrimination that still concentrates minorities in the state’s big cities.
“It’s the bedrock of racism in America,” Scot X. Esdaile, president of the state NAACP, said Friday, admitting that he is both saddened and excited by the evidence of obstacles faced by previous generations.
“Housing has been a huge issue for black people in America,” he said. “It’s the difference between landlord and the landless and shows how systemic racism has blocked our people and continues to block people.”
Widespread, lingering legacy of racism
David K. Ware, a retired corporate lawyer and candidate for a master of laws degree at the University of Connecticut School of Law
recently published a study that uncovered about 250 properties in three neighborhoods in the city of Manchester that had racially restrictive covenants, including Greenway Park, Lakewood Circle and Bowers Farm, which were developed before 1950, when the city’s African American population totaled one fifth of one percent.
“The continued existence of racially restrictive covenants in out land records is an irritant that cannot escape the attention of groups and individuals that care about equality, fairness and inclusion,” Ware wrote. “If we hope to ever achieve the ideals that inform our best aspirations for human fairness we must begin by examining both our informal practices and behaviors and importantly for present purposes the government-sanctioned receptacles of our formal acts and deeds, i.e. the statements contained in the local record themselves.”
Jack A. Dougherty, a Trinity College professor, and co-author of a book on the development of West Hartford that also includes a deed to the Moodus Estates in East Haddam, said that even in state neighborhoods without written racial specifications, prospective homeowners were forced to continue the exclusionary tactics, which were rampant across the nation from the 1920s to the 1948 court ruling.
“The theory is they couldn’t buy the property unless they agreed to the bylaws,” Dougherty said in an interview, stressing that the practice was likely routine across the state. And until the St. Louis-based court case of Shelley v. Kraemer, it was the job of state officials to enforce the covenants, if black families tried to moved into neighborhoods and a neighbor filed suit.
“These tools of segregation have created the privileges that exist today,” Dougherty said.
Sara G. Bronin, a UConn law professor who is an expert on housing and land use, said property owners in Connecticut have the ability to simply take out the offending covenant language and record a new deed without the covenant.
“A town clerk has to accept any document related to a piece of land,” said Bronin, describing such restrictive covenants as very common.
Expunge or preserve historic evidence
“They can just take it out,” Bronin, the wife of Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, said in an interview. “Just delete it from the land description. It’s void as a matter of public policy and need not be included.”
But in doing so, residents may wipe out a telltale record of a state that promotes itself as progressive and inclusive. The issue dates back about 90 years, when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board was created during the Great Depression to help homeowners keep their properties, said LaDale Winling, a history professor at Virginia Tech who studies housing.
“It was most frequently used for racial and home-value restrictions, making sure sure that African Americans and other minorities and immigrant groups did not move into neighborhoods that could change the character of neighborhoods and put investors’ money at risk,” Winling said during a forum led by Dougherty on Friday in downtown Hartford at Trinity’s Liberal Arts Action Lab.
Winling suggested that homeowners in communities where restrictive covenants have been found should get together to address the issue. “There are neighborhoods where people say this should be a testament,” Winling said. “It’s tough for me to say if there is a right strategy. Individually if someone is extremely
uncomfortable with that language on their deed, then absolutely go for it.”
In other states, legislatures have allowed property owners to amend their deeds, repudiating the history of covenants while not expunging them from the record. “All I want to do is avoid people whitewashing the past by putting it under the rug,” Dougherty said.
Unlike some of the western states that have tackled the issue, Connecticut has no measures in place to repudiate the historic language.
“I understand it is part of history,” said Davis, the lakeside cottage buyer. “I don’t need to see it in black and white. It’s important to be able to get rid of this stuff. The fact that they wrote something like this in the past is sickening and disturbing and offensive. I want to have the ability for this to be purged.”
State Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, co-chairman of the Real Estate and Insurance Committee, said he was amenable to expunging town records. “I think it sounds like a great idea,” he said. “It is a horribly embarrassing anachronism. That institutionalized racism has shaped our geography today.”
Attorney General William Tong agreed that housing discrimination exists to this day, with minority neighborhoods subjected to denials of mortgages in tactics called redlining.
“These racist restrictions are etched in our land records as shameful evidence of a not-so-distant past,” Tong said. “These covenants have not been legally enforceable since 1948, but housing discrimination is alive and well today. Discrimination is not always explicit. Thinly-veiled discrimination is at work today including exclusionary zoning ordinances, redlining, and source-of-income discrimination. Where we live affects every aspect of our lives—our health, safety, education, transportation, access to jobs, and more. This was true pre-1948, and is still true today.”
“We need a dialogue about this, the racist secrets of America,” said Esdaile, a member of the NAACP’s national board. “This racism still exists in housing and people feel the effects of it.”