What is a covenant or racial restriction?
What do they look like? How do you find them?
Covenants come in a variety of forms. They could be plat restrictions, established by a real estate developer from the time a subdivision was laid out. They could be agreements, signed by residents in a neighborhood, never to sell, lease, or allow occupancy by someone who was not Caucasian, then filed with the county recorder of deeds. They could be private block restrictions on a small enclave within a city. They could be a short clause within a deed document, where the restriction or covenant language was embedded in every deed document when the property was transferred. You can see several examples of these types below. To learn more about these individual examples and how they worked, you can visit the projects’ websites through our Who We Are page.
There are several ways to find covenants and racial restrictions. All of these land records are kept by your county (or county-equivalent) clerk or recorder of deeds. In many counties, these documents have been digitized and are available over the web or at a computer terminal in the recorder’s office. If you have a committed group and are willing to negotiate with county officials, you may be able to get access to the whole database. In some counties, covenants are old enough (mostly pre-1948) that they are largely kept with analog documents that were never digitized. In that case, you must learn how they are stored and work through the archive to find them. In almost every community, you may need to do some background research of any existing studies to find out what neighborhoods the covenants were in, or were most likely to have been in. For more resources on how to get started, Contact Us.
Plat restriction
Warranty deed
Agreement covenant
Private street restrictions
Home Owners Association