Auction of 136 Adams Street NW, 1941 Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard Univ.

Auction of 136 Adams Street NW, 1941

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard Univ.

Charles Hamilton Houston, 1931 Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum  of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Charles Hamilton Houston, 1931

Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum 

of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Sign advertising new subdivision, 1930

DC Public Library

The Neighbors Inc. Records DC Public Library

The Neighbors Inc. Records
DC Public Library

DC Public LIbrary

DC Public Library

Petworth, late 1920s   Library of Congress

Petworth, late 1920s  
Library of Congress

 Mapping Segregation
in Washington DC

From Restrictive Covenants 

to Racial Steering

A SPECIAL EXHIBIT ON 


THE FIGHT FOR FAIR HOUSING IN WASHINGTON DC

This exhibit was launched in 2018 to mark the anniversaries of several milestones in the history of fair housing.

May 3, 1948. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that the enforcement of racially 

restrictive deed covenants was unconstitutional. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston argued and won a DC companion case, Hurd v. Hodge.

 

November 1948. The National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital published

Segregation in Washington, detailing the profound social and economic impacts of racist housing policies in DC.

June 1958. DC residents organized Neighbors, Inc. to combat racial steering and white flight.

April 11 1968. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII, known

as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited most forms of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in the sale or rental of housing and in mortgage lending.

 

June 17, 1968. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. Mayer  that racial discrimination in the

sale or rental of property violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Almost all conditions under which discrimination had remained legal under the Fair Housing Act—for example the right of religious groups or private clubs to discriminate—were thus removed.


This special exhibit has three components.


The Campaign Against Covenants: A Tour of Bloomingdale’s Racial Divide is a guide to key sites in the history of black home seekers’ efforts to purchase housing restricted to whites. Discover why Bloomingdale’s premier architectural corridor was also a racial barrier, and how civil rights attorneys chipped away at this dividing line in the 1920s–’40s. The tour is available in the DC Historic Sites mobile app, which can be downloaded for iOS and Android.


Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants maps more than 40 properties that were the subject of lawsuits over the right to freely buy, rent, or convey property. Learn why DC's Bloomingdale neighborhood was central to the NAACP’s national campaign to abolish racial covenants.


Race and Real Estate in Mid-Century DC: The Neighbors, Inc. Records offers a selection of documents that pointedly illustrate how real estate practices combined with other discriminatory policies to facilitate DC’s racial transformation in the 1950s and ‘60s. Most of these come from the DC Public Library.

Covenants Map

Restricted Housing and Racial Change, 1940-1970

full-screen map in new window.

Story Maps

About the Project

Mapping Segregation in Washington DC reveals the role of race in shaping the nation's capital during the first half of the 20th century.


Racially restrictive covenants—which barred the conveyance of property to African Americans—were used by real estate developers and White citizens associations to create and maintain racial barriers. Upheld by the courts, covenants assigned value to housing and to entire neighborhoods based on the race of their occupants, and made residential segregation the norm. Federal policy and local zoning codes served to institutionalize segregation and the displacement of Black residents. As shown in this project’s story maps, segregated housing projects, schools, and playgrounds also helped create exclusively White neighborhoods and concentrate Black residents in areas that were older and overcrowded or remote and less developed.


Although eventually outlawed, racial covenants had a lasting imprint on the city. Their association of Whiteness with higher property values led to decades of disinvestment in areas where most Black residents lived. Their legacy remains visible in the unequal distribution and quality of public resources such as parks, hospitals, and grocery stores and in the persistence of segregated neighborhoods and schools. Finally, by barring Black access to wealth-building through real estate, covenants contributed to today’s vast racial wealth gap in DC. By revealing the deliberate harm inflicted on Black Washingtonians via the use and enforcement of racial covenants and racist land use policies, this project is meant, in part, to serve as a resource for redress.


Mapping Segregation is a resource for historians, activists, educators, students, and journalists, and provides essential context for conversations around race and gentrification in DC. The project's maps unveil historical patterns that would otherwise remain invisible and largely unknown. The ongoing, lot-by-lot documentation of racial covenants is set in the context of DC's demographic transformation over the course of several decades. Primary documents, archival news clippings, photographs, and oral testimony also contribute to the stories these maps tell.


Conceived by historians Mara Cherkasky, Sarah Jane Shoenfeld, and Brian Kraft, this project has received funding from Humanities DC, the DC Preservation League, and the National Park Service. Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, Michael Corey, and Bliss Cartwright provided GIS and data support. Other supporters include All Souls Housing Corporation, the Military Road School Preservation Trust, the DC History Center, and Neighbors, Inc.


This website was produced with assistance from the Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.

Contact

We invite you to help us

Review DC deeds and document those with racial covenants, using the crowd-sourced platform Zooniverse. 


Our partners at the University of Minnesota hold online training/transcription sessions twice a month. 


Click here to learn more and sign up. Or watch a training session on that same page and get to work now.


If you have trouble accessing the research after creating a Zooniverse account, try
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mappingprejudice/mapping-prejudice/




Click “sign in”

Go back to https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mappingprejudice/mapping-prejudice/


Be sure to choose Washington DC!


If you’d like us to hold a special training for your group or class, contact us at mappingsegregationdc@gmail.com. 


Prologue DC happily accepts donations for this project! Please note: donations are not
tax-deductible.