Q&A: How Mapping Prejudice used maps and property records to examine the Twin Cities’ racist past

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Minnesota has the highest disparity of homeownership rates between white and Black people in the entire country. Though people likely had a good understanding of the way that racial covenants — a now illegal clause in a property record to prohibit the purchase of a home by someone who isn’t white — there was still a question of how many covenants there were throughout the state, primarily in the Twin Cities metro.

That is, until Hennepin County digitized its property records. Once that happened, the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project came along and started to look into a smaller scale version of that question: How many racial covenants were there in Hennepin County?

Now, eight years later the group has solved that question and then some. The co-founder and project director of Mapping Prejudice, Kirsten Delegard said the group has pioneered the way to research, examine and map racial covenants while also expanding their reach to examining the rest of the Twin Cities metro.

Delegard sat down with Finance & Commerce this Fair Housing Month to talk through the work of the project, how research is conducted and how crowdsourcing has been a vital part of the project’s operation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Can you provide our audience with a little bit of background on what mapping prejudice is?

A: We are a public history project and digital humanities project. We’re based in the University of Minnesota Libraries. And we are focused on working with community members to document and to map racial covenants.

Q: How do you go about finding this information? How do you go about finding, there were racial covenants in this neighborhood or that neighborhood?

A: I just want to be clear, racial covenants were considered sort of best practice for most of the 20th century. They were promoted by the National Association of Realtors, local Realty organizations, banks, and very importantly, the federal government. Pretty much you couldn’t find any institution that had anything to do with real estate that did not promote racial covenants for most of the 20th century. That means they’re in every community across the country.

For most of the 20th century, researchers were curious about how many of these racial covenants are there in American property records? Where are they? What did they say? When were they put into place? And all of those questions were impossible to answer in a really comprehensive way before the advent of digitized property records.

We went to the county recorder, they gave us several million pages of digitized records. My colleagues then used (optical character recognition) technology and Python scripting to go through those digitized records to identify the records that seemed to have this racist language in it. And we came back with about 30,000 records in Hennepin County that seemed to have a racial covenant.

We actually thought about whether or not we could just read through those as a team before really concluding that was crazy. We decided we wanted to try to use crowdsourcing. There was a digital crowdsourcing platform that had been developed called Zooniverse. We put these records that seem to have this racist language on them into this crowdsourcing platform. Then, we went out to community groups and looked for volunteers, asked people if they would be willing to read through these records and transcribe the information that we need to put on a modern map.

We were absolutely, I have to say, shocked and delighted at the reception that we got, and that people really embraced this task and really understood the importance of documenting the structural barriers to homeownership in history. And that’s when the Mapping Prejudice project really took off in 2016-2017. Ever since then, this has opened up a whole new field of research around the history of material barriers to homeownership in the United States.

Q: I was wondering when you look at this this time lapse of a heat map of where all of these racial covenants are, a lot of them really pop up in the south suburbs of Minneapolis. I was wondering why is there such a particularly large amount of covenants in that area?

A: The earliest racial covenant we have located so far in Minnesota is from 1910. The location where we find racial covenants is in the places that were developed after 1910, and before 1960. When you see that cluster of racial covenants in the southern part of Minneapolis, and then the southern cities, that’s because those are the areas that were developing at that time.

The way racial covenants worked is it wasn’t individual property owners that were putting them in. It was the real estate developers when they plated the land to make it available for residential development. They would put these racist restrictions over the whole development.

Q: For people who might be in the real estate industry reading this, how do you see racial covenants impacting their everyday work?

A: One of our earliest and strongest partnerships as a project has been with the Minneapolis Area Realtors, because we didn’t have to do very much explaining to that group for them to understand why these covenants still matter today, even though they’ve been illegal since 1968.

These are the realtors, the people who are sort of on the front lines of buying and selling houses and working with people to find a new home, really had had this experience many times of encountering this text in the property records and having to explain to potential buyers, that this is not legal, and try to reassure people that it wouldn’t either make them feel unwelcome, or you know, jeopardize their ability to buy and to own this home.

One of the valuable things about developing this kind of granular data around these historic restrictions is you can lay that data on a contemporary map, to help you see how these restrictions have shaped the landscape today. One thing that reveals is that the areas of the Twin Cities that had racial covenants are today still predominantly white. Once those demographic patterns were put into place, they really remained intact. That really helps people understand why perhaps they might have heard stories about why they might not be welcomed in certain neighborhoods.

Q: Is there anything else that you were hoping to add to this conversation that maybe I haven’t asked you the right question for here?

A: I just want people to be really aware of the resources that we have created. Sometimes when I talk to people, they’re aware of Mapping Prejudice, but they’re not aware that you can go to our website if you’re in the Twin Cities metro and put in your address and see whether or not we found a racial covenant on your home or a property that you’re curious about.

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